Artwork Title: “Dawn 7- detail” from the The Veils of Dawn Exhibition
Year: 2024
Medium: Porcelain, Textile, Wood
In another borderland, between waking and dreaming, I found something that held me: Softness, a gentleness that seemed to rise with the break of every new day. Southern Arizona unfolds dawns and dusks with colors that I haven’t witnessed anywhere else I’ve lived.
The pieces hold the transient colors of many mornings and evenings I’ve witnessed in Tucson, Arizona.. Each piece symbolizes a fragment of the sky, expanded out of a fine porcelain slab. The fragile slabs are then carefully folded and layered snuggly. To finally rest on top of upholstered canvases.
Ibrahim Khazzaka’s description of The Veils of Dawn Exhibition pieces.
The Veils of Dawn is an invitation to contemplate hard and soft materials and to revisit transient moments of sensual contemplation: That your heart softens with the ever-shifting beauty of a fresh day.
Introducing our Color Palette of the Month artist, Ibrahim Khazzaka!
Meet our April Color Palette Artist, Ibrahim Khazzaka, a Lebanese transnational artist whose vibrant sculptures and installations explore themes of affection, identity and belonging.
After a career in psychology and education across Lebanon, Dubai, and Los Angeles, he moved to New York City in 2018 to focus on his studio practice.
He earned his MFA in ceramics from SUNY New Paltz in 2023 and now teaches Design and Art History at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona.
Khazzaka’s work is deeply influenced by his multicultural experiences and emphasizes intercultural dialogue, place-making, and material research.
His recent exhibition, “The Veils of Dawn,” showcased ceramic pieces inspired by the beauty of Southwest sunrises and sunsets, reflecting his interest in the balance between discomfort and belonging.
“Engaging with malleable materials like clay allows me to explore my identity in flux and my perceptions, making my art a medium for personal and cultural expression and a tool for me to make sense of it all.”
In reflecting on the emotional and cultural layers within his work, Khazzaka offers a poetic insight into how his contrasting color palettes coexist and represent a visual explanation of his cultural realities:
For me, color is a map of my lived contradictions and reconciliations. Contrast in color reads the way I understand the friction between cultural realities: not in opposition on the color wheel, but as negotiation. In my studio, placing a cool violet next to a burnt orange mirrors my internal tension of inhabiting multiple identities, where each beautiful shade defines, elevates and softens the other. In the quiet hum of complimentary colors, such as soft pinks with mossy greens, or the color of clay against different hues of the sky, I find the memory of many place I called home.
My process is intuitive, and tender. Reaching, Remembering, Layering of what I see fit, and what belongs together.Understanding the science behind Southwestern sunrises and sunsets, how dust particles and dry air intensify warm hues and reduce light diffusion influences my surface decoration. For me, this means selecting glaze application techniques that mimic the clarity and saturation of desert skies. Different glaze effects become less about depicting the sky, and more about capturing how it feels.
Ibrahim Khazzaka on how he chooses his color palettes.
