Marie Khediguian

This series is a visual reckoning with the recent death of my mother, explored through three oil paintings drawn from family photographs and memory. Inspired by Arshile Gorky’s repeated, unfinished portraits of his mother, I ask: how do we hold on to someone who is no longer here, and what do we do with everything left behind?

Each painting captures her at a different point in her life. Ara & Nairi shows her as a joyful child on her grandparents’ rooftop in 1950s Alexandria, Egypt. Between Then and Now depicts her as a young woman beside my father in a 1970s snapshot, surrounded by small objects that now carry the weight of absence. Failing Towards Brilliance is a raw, unresolved portrait made in the months after her death—a conversation with her memory and my grief.

As the daughter and granddaughter of Armenian Genocide survivors, I come from a lineage shaped by loss, displacement, and silence. These works become a site of emotional excavation, an attempt to hold on and to materialize the love and sorrow carried across generations. The act of painting resists erasure, keeping me in relationship with my mother, with memory, and with mourning.