Ali Eyal
California, USA
Visual
Artist in Residence, 2025
McLaughlin Foundation Award
↗ https://alieyal.com/
Artist Statement
I feel like an artist in a court, sketching frantically on my fictional—or perhaps real—farm. But the lines don’t always connect. There is loss, ghosts, and absence. The farm is a mythical origin, lost and returning in new shapes within my work. My image does not match its description. I am a walking cemetery. They are invading my practice, shaping my semi-fictional existence, possessed by spirits. For nine years, I have refused to show my face—an absence in dialogue with missing persons, lost villages, destroyed houses. “A house is like a face too.” My practice moves between personal history and transitory memory. My work, mainly drawing, expands into installations, photography, text, and video—like pages from a stolen book unfolding endlessly. My ideas are not mine. Otherwise, I’d be painting rivers. Instead, I am ink-soaked paper, a woodworm hidden behind furniture, slowly consuming everything.
While at Headlands
At Headlands, I plan to create a painting and develop a project about Paul Bremer, the first U.S. administrator of Iraq post-Saddam, who, like President Bush, has become a painter. His focus is houses. He even has an art website with his number displayed on the banner. I called, and when I asked if this was Paul Bremer—in my accent—he immediately hung up. This project explores the absurdity of power, occupation, and historical erasure through painting, text, and installation. I am interested in the house as both a subject and metaphor—how it can be lost, rebuilt, or fictionalized. My work often oscillates between personal history and collective memory, and I see my time at Headlands as a way to push these ideas further, to work in proximity to the landscape, and to experiment with how history and fiction collide in artistic practice.
