Aram is a Korean born multi media artist whose family immigrated to Modesto California when Aram was five years old.
Her undergraduate work focused on art and Latin American studies. She worked primarily in figurative ceramics, studying under Richard Shaw at the University of California Berkeley. She then received her post baccalaureate certificate in fine arts at Maryland Institute of Art. Aram is currently working towards an MFA in fiber and material studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The piece in the Modest in Scale exhibition is called Ornament and Order and is made using a shirt collar with white rice and thread. Ornament and Order is one of several works inspired by the traditional South, Southeast, and East Asian mythology of the Rice Goddess or Rice Mother. In many versions the mother is killed and the first rice grows from her body. Rice now feeds over half the total world population today; the feeding of countless bodies traced back to first rice.
Aram grew up in an immigrant family and watched her mother sacrifice her dreams and much of her happiness to provide for and feed her family. Aran mimics her mother’s work as a seamstress and stitches grains of rice onto garments. She is inspired by Joseph Campbell’s suggestion to look to mythology to create metaphors to understand our daily lives. In this series the artist is connecting the life of the immigrant mother with the mythological rice mother.
I look forward to learning more about Aram and her work over the course of the coming year as we plan an exhibit to featureing her work os one of the four Modest In Scale award recipients.
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