A Yellow World A Blue Sun, 2023

Nassar has created a series of “split-screen” embroidered landscapes with shifting colorways. Tonal changes at the midpoint of the canvases interrupt the horizontality of the landscape, creating juxtapositions of color and form. These double compositions are a physical expression of what Nassar terms, “the dislocating experience of being in two places simultaneously.” Lines function as borders that bleed into each other, threaded across the field of the image.

Nassar frequently draws upon the connection between image-making and language. The inspiration for the title of the exhibition, as well as titles of the embroidered works on view, stems from the surreal poem The Arab Apocalypse, written by Lebanese-American artist and poet Etel Adnan in response to the outbreak of the Civil War in Lebanon. The embroideries themselves are hazy and dreamlike visualizations of Adnan's poetry. In "A Yellow World A Blue Sun", two skies exist simultaneously, split into two shifting yellow and blue colorways.