Early in our recording, Esther told us how well Instagram knows her, because “Instagram just sends me videos of farming Amish barn raisings.” It fit a conversation that kept returning to her family’s farms, which began in the Ermia valley in Iran and moved to Turlock, California, where the Assyrian community still grows almonds, peaches, grapes and walnuts. Her dad left for art school and became a graphic designer at Gallo, while Esther set out to be a classical violinist until a wrist injury ended that around sixteen or seventeen. It was her older brother who suggested art school, because “you’ve been drawing this entire conversation.” She started in illustration at the California College of the Arts and then landed in a painting class with almost no structure, which made her feel like “the god of my own painting.”
Her paintings of Assyrian women bodybuilders grew out of a stretch on her Instagram feed, when ISIS was destroying Assyrian sculptures at the museum in Mosul and a new women’s gym in Turlock kept sending her photos of friends flexing and entering powerlifting competitions.
She began painting those women as descendants of the ancient deities, and that thread runs into Bazaar Ashuraya, her solo show of paintings and clothing at Hecho a Mano through November 29, which turns toward the contemporary Assyrian home.
The paintings show friends and family in clothing from her Depop wishlist, “surrounded by objects I would love to buy from Facebook Marketplace.” Esther tells us that wishlist began in the middle of the night with a newborn and a toddler, when she screenshotted finds and sent them to her husband because “I can’t buy something at two in the morning for sure,” and one of them, a Mara Hoffman strapless jumpsuit, ended up in a painting. All of it comes back to the home, which she describes as the place where culture thrives without the pressure of “doing it right.”