Artist Statement

“I focus on the experience of being part of the Palestinian diaspora—being raised with a yearning for the homeland and a nostalgia for a place that’s passed down through generations. While tatreez is at the center of my practice, I also create work in other mediums like glass-beaded works in the style of glasswork from Hebron, and more recently, woodworking with brass inlay in the Levantine style.

I was inspired by the many tile works in the [Shangri La] collection, and felt that this commission was the perfect opportunity to work in the medium for the first time. While the vast majority of the landscapes I depict are imaginary, for this commission I wanted to make something special for Shangri La, capturing Lē‘ahi (Diamond Head Crater) in this new medium. This piece depicts Lē‘ahi twice - once at dawn and once at dusk, as one ongoing composition in which the rose colored water below one Lē‘ahi is also the sky above the other.”

Jordan Nassar
Lē‘ahi
2022
Colored glass tiles, stone paste mortar, steel

Jordan Nassar’s encounters with tatreez (Palestinian embroidery) began on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City where his Palestinian father and Polish mother raised him in a home filled with embroidered home décor objects and clothing from his father’s ancestral homeland of Palestine. The intricate embroidery was a starting point for Nassar to reconceptualize the stitching as pixels. The shift in visual orientation creates a unique language through which to craft imaginative landscapes that convey joy and contemporaneity.

While Nassar has experimented with glass and inlaid wood in the past, Lē‘ahi from Shangri La, 2022 – his first-ever artwork crafted in glass tiles – transforms the pixels used here into individual tiles of glass. One may see in a corpus of such fragments, and their incorporation into an evocative pattern, the longing of the diasporic and the disaffected to create beauty from rubble, rebuilding an experience from memory and imagination. Here, the hazy landscapes and mirrored mountains are clearly inspired by Lē‘ahi, yet have an otherworldly effect of possessing a vision of something entirely familiar yet not yet in focus, like envisioning one’s homeland across shifting times and perspectives.