About This Artwork

Artist Statement/ “Flight of the imagination” The boundary series illustrates the border between reality and fantasy as well as madness and sanity. In April 1915 during the Armenian Genocide, Komitas (a genius composer and musicologist as well as a devoted Christian priest who saved Armenian folk music from extinction) along with hundreds of other Armenian intellectuals, was arrested and deported to a prison camp by the Ottoman government. Personally, growing up with his music which is an important source of my inspiration; I depict his horrifying journey and its tragic end; mass-scale Armenians death marches and massacres, passing by corpses, skeletons and moans of dying people, tortured by hunger and thirst in the desert worsened his fragile mental state. Komitas portraits an Armenian who to this day, is suffering with the devastating effects of psychological trauma passed on through generations of survivors. A lot of untold stories remain to be told and discovered about him and over 1.5 million lost souls of Armenian Genocide and those who escaped from it with severe psychological sufferings. Komitas’s story is a symbol of the emotional wounds left behind by human malice and evil, wounds inherited by all Armenians.