This is Worldtown Magazine Feature on Me

Garrotte (Sex Doll) Joseph Shahadi,
Digital C-Print 24" x 30" from the series TV Eros

Speaking of shameless self-promotion...

The web magazine This is Worldtown has done a feature on me and my artwork illustrated with images from my series TV Eros. TIWT founders Sana Malik and Ausma Malik write,

"Representations of youth from immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds are usually created in the context of crisis, as so-called failures of integration, or as ethnicized trends in fashion and music. This is Worldtown aims to challenge this notion and the inauthentic representations of this generation which are often lumped together merely on the basis of race, religion or background.

As a webzine, This is Worldtown offers an edgy take on our collective yet varied experiences by providing features on politics, popular culture and individual perspectives."

And in the feature on my work I write,

"I have always been fascinated with in-between states. I think that is partly my personality and partly because I’m Arab American: in the culture but not of it. My grandparents immigrated to the US from Lebanon at the beginning of the 20th century and I grew up watching cartoons, reading comic books and drawing in my sketchpad, dreaming. When I was a kid my father called me into his workshop in the garage and showed me an old National Geographic pictorial of Beirut from before it was broken into a million pieces. We stood there flipping through it and he said, “This is what it looked like…it was beautiful” A few years later my dad was dead and like Beirut he was only alive for me in pictures. In the world of pictures, nothing ever goes all the way away. But it does. And we are between the two, staying and going, always. We are lousy with ghosts.

I grew up to be an artist to try and make sense of this."

... Go and check out the magazine and leave a comment.