I first met Toba Khedoori when she was a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of California in Los Angeles. I was an undergraduate at the same university, hesitating between majors. I remember being both captivated and disoriented by her work when I first saw it. The elements of her paintings, like the words in a poem, were familiar to me. Yet in their composition and interaction, they acquired an ambiguous form of estrangement. Khedoori covers the large sheets of paper that she habitually paints on with wax, turning them into a palimpsest that retains and embalms the incidental traces of her activity. Her renderings often float against an absence of background, context, or place. Whereas the works of many of her contemporaries are relentlessly framed by texts and paratexts, Khedoori’s paintings are made all the more eloquent by the self-effacement of their author. Since then, I have kept looking, thinking, and occasionally writing about her work. My relationship to it has evolved, but in a curious manner. The artist, who is Australian-born and of Iraqi descent, creates paintings that lead me back to that initial feeling of interrogation, meaning to question in between, from within the space of an interval. Certain artworks or bodies of work require additional information, or address themselves to external ideas.
Read more at L'Officiel Magazine.