Askia Bilal
Die B4 U Die
May 2 - June 27, 2025
Opie Gallery
Through a series of deconstructed portraits that I call Non-portraits, I explore different manifestations of “the self” as a means of probing Identity and the Human experience. Some of the larger themes I’m grappling with in these works are notions of death and rebirth, the boundaries between mortality and Eternity, the self and otherness, portraiture and iconoclasm.
I combine drawing, painting, digital mark-making, sewing, and image transfers from select source material that I manipulate in a layered process that is cyclic. My interest in multiplicity and deconstruction drives me to take my own images apart, to reassemble, rearrange, and recycle them to use as a foundation to build new images. This enables me to explore different iterations of the aforementioned themes, while also reinforcing the cyclic nature of making and the dialogue between and within the works themselves.
Artist Statement:
I use artwork as a tool to search for meaning - to make sense of myself, the world and the Human Experience. I weave together representational and abstract elements with a range of literary, historical and philosophical references to create narratives with overlapping meanings. This is embodied in my work through a motif called the Non-portrait. The Non-portraits started as a response to two competing impulses I felt to simultaneously reject and participate in portraiture. The Non-portrait is a way of drawing on aspects of my own lived experiences that are contradictory (for example feeling invisible and hypervisible at the same time), while also serving as an archetype with which to explore larger themes that connect to the broader Human Experience.
Artist Bio:
Askia is a Missouri-based artist who was born in Queens, New York. Working between representation and abstraction, he employs a mixed media approach that combines acrylic, oil paint, dry media, digital media and collage elements to tell stories about the Human Experience. He graduated from Columbia College (Missouri) with a BFA and he received his MFA from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Askia exhibits his artwork regionally and nationally. He also holds a Master’s in English and teaches at the University of Missouri-Columbia.