Jamelie Hassan

     Jamelie Hassan was born in London, Ontario in 1948. Currently she is living and working in London. Her work  deals with Politically based images expressed through ceramics, painting, video, and mixed media. Working in London early in her career, and being from  Arab decent made it very difficult to gain acceptance within the academic and social community. Jamelie uses this tension in her work and attempts to bridge the gap between cultures using visual and text based images. Over the years in London she had acquired over seven studio spaces and had been evicted from all of them. As well each space was systematically torn down much to the response of the community and their inability to embrace the art community. She was given the opportunity to travel to the middle east to study her practice. She found the experience very interesting, and met another artist that she traveled with throughout the middle east, painting around sixty works and giving most of them away along her travels. The political context was a issue regarding many of her works. The work " Hong Kong" is imagery that has been taken from the store front of an old Chinese restaurant. She attempts to have the viewer recognize the physical presence to a place.
   With growing up in an Arabic speaking home her traditions also played a large role in her work. The piece "Midnight children" illustrates small books of Satanic verses being burned, and also small cups or coffee grounds. Reading of the trace coffee grounds was a tradition that Jamelie had experienced many times growing up. Jameilie has had to deal with her work being protested and challenged within the art community as well as within the academics. An academic at the University of London actually went so far as to fuel a public campaign in the papers in response to a piece she had done. In response she said, "they didn't know who they were messing with" and in the larger context she believed that such publicity actually did more good then bad. In her final work she presented "Oblivion Seekers" which was a video project she studied. She used archives, race, news footage, and exclusion. The work was a collection of video clips of men and women dancing in a time when Arabs were represented very negatively. In conclusion Jamelie illustrates that taking a position within her practice has been helpful, and it only helps to further inform her art.