Project Room | Maryam Yousif: Tremble Like Reeds

Maryam Yousif: Tremble Like Reeds is Yousif’s first solo exhibition in the Project Room at Rebecca Camacho Presents. Yousif’s show combines individual clay sculptures in an installation that elucidates the artist’s ongoing engagement with Mesopotamian mythologies, histories and objects alongside modernist visual vocabularies and contemporary popular culture. Yousif’s new body of work is informed by the poetry of Enheduanna, a Sumerian high priestess and daughter of Sargon of Akkad (Assyria, 24th - 23rd century BCE), who is considered to be the first known author. Symbols and imagery found in Enheduanna’s poems and ancient antiquities from Assyria are fused with Yousif’s own distinctive sensibility derived from sources such as Iraqi modernism and Bay Area Funk.

Several works draw upon Yousif’s personal effects, including family photographs and a letter written by the artist’s mother in the 1970s. A brief passage of text and a drawing – both from the letter – are prominent features in a new bas-relief sculpture by Yousif. The text reads: “From my mothers’ hands,” and is carved into the surface of the work adjacent to a drawing of a young woman. Here, the text and imagery offer a profound statement, pointing to Yousif’s ability to interweave personal histories with histories of female artists, writers, and makers across time and space.