Bio:
My name is Tiara Tiana. I am currently based in Charlotte, North Carolina. I am a printmaker, illustrator, and collage artist that creates works about my travel experiences and mentality throughout my experiences. I studied at Fayetteville Technical Community College for my AFA in Visuals and I am currently completing my BFA in Printmaking with a Spanish Minor at UNC Charlotte. I love to travel, learn about culture, and take the time to try to experience new endeavors. My works are an embodiment of those experiences.
Artist Statement:
From a young age, I dreamed of traveling the world. In Fall of 2022, I was granted the opportunity to live and study in Madrid, Spain for half a year. It was my first exposure to a different culture in a foreign environment. During this experience, I found myself embracing adaptation as a compromise with culture. I did not truly grasp this newly found concept until after returning home.
My first experience abroad felt quite surreal; I was finally living the dream I had chased for so long. I was allowed to open my mind to different cultures, mentalities, and ways of life. I chose to study abroad in Madrid, Spain to improve my Spanish and accessibility to other European countries. When I first moved there, a lot of complications, fascinations, and culture shocks hit me all at once. Despite the complexity, I learned how to adapt, realigning my mind and my body within a new cultural structure. Although Spain was my homebase, I ventured out into Italy, France, and the Netherlands. Euphoria engulfed me every time I entered an airport, knowing I would soon walk into another land with an entirely different culture.
My work is an expressive print series where I use self-portraiture to create conversations based on my recent multicultural experience. I place multiple collages of myself in asymmetrical orientations to discuss how being exposed to another world can be mentally disorienting for a person. I also decided to use the national flowers from each country that I visited to further symbolize my travels. My chosen mediums are drypoint on sintra board, collagraph, and collage.