Elina Marie Ansary was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. She holds a BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute (2013). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
I am driven by the ache of an evanescent past enduring within a transient present. My work explores memory, and how we experience recollection, and how we process impermanence, and how collective memory shapes culture and community. Transience, the past, the passage of time, impermanence, memory: all these ideas encircle one larger, all-encompassing thing—Death.

I was raised on a diet of stories, descended from wanderers, at the intersection of varied cultures. My father is a writer from Afghanistan; my mother is a Jewish ex-clown. In San Francisco where I grew up, their differences didn’t really matter. I often dream of doubles and doppelgängers. Duality runs deep like a mineral vein. Two things can be true at once. You can be two different things at once.

I operate within the tradition of western figurative painting, but also Persian miniatures. I make Painting experiential through manipulations of format, integrating found objects, breaking the fourth wall and merging dimension. The works are two things at once: an image, an object. I look for new and inclusive systems of showing and decimating work that can turn representational painting into a tool for social practice. I present paintings like rituals, like reliquaries, like altars, invoking the symbolic history of material, and I catalyze these elements with imagery.