Sharq: Three Artists / Many Worlds

Ashen Ovsepjan was born in Armenia and emigrated to Germany where she taught, worked, and exhibited as a designer, photographer, and artist before coming to Los Angeles. A world traveler, her mixed media works begin with the captured images of her memory, using sources such as photos and mixing them with other artistic media. This technique, she likes to say, mirrors the different cultures in which she’s grown up and the many different languages she speaks.

Khalid Hussein was born in Saudi Arabia, grew up in both the Middle East and the US, and received a BA in Fine Art and MA in Islamic Studies from UCLA. He works in a variety of media, focusing on representations of race, identity, history and violence. His paintings, exhibited in art galleries and cultural centers in California, imitate the cities of the ancient world, superimposing multiple images, styles, and cultural referents, collapsing barriers between past and present, east and west. 

Noah Haytin was born in the Bay Area and earned his MFA from California State University at Long Beach. He won a Fulbright grant to Morocco, has traveled and exhibited internationally, and now splits his time between Marrakech and California. Interested in the fluid nature of identity, he creates collages in what he calls a menagerie of lost and found imagery from traditional drawing and painting and the digital domain, juxtaposing the modern and the ancient.