Do what is important to you and it’ll seep into the world the way it needs to be!! Conversation with Amna Asghar

By looking at Amna Asghar’s art pieces, I feel like I can see lots of different kinds of elements being combined into every single piece. There are elements from the past, and there are elements that exist in our daily lives. We can distinguish different elements clearly, and it is super surprising for me to see how all the elements work together and become a cohesive piece. Before talking with her, I get the concept of she is a kind of person that likes what she doing, and she is a person with defined identity. Also, she loves to focus on things that appeared in her daily life; the packaging and combining them into her works of art. 

Talking to Asghar, I find she is a kind of person who dives into living. She knows what she loves, and goes from there. Asghar loves graphics, she collects lots of different covers, spends lots of time looking through food products, news and food menus. When Asghar finds something she likes, she will put notes on them and describe why she likes the cover or the graphics. From the conversation, I found herself to have that deep love in the graphics, and she demonstrated her love of having all graphics being combined together to show her identity. 

With a strong love of graphic elements, this pushed Asghar to move back to Detroit. Asghar says, “I think that is one of the biggest reasons that I moved home back to Detroit. Actually, I just wanted to get work done”. Back home, Asghar was able to find an incredible big space where she can push or develop her concepts into a higher level. To combine all graphic elements, Asghar works with Photoshop. Herselves like to show the process photos, she loves to see the process photos because she thinks it takes away that element of mystery a little bit. 

In her work, we can see slices of images sitting together, taking the idea of proximity of images together. We can see like the menu slices, disney animation, and snakes from the jungle book. All those elements are coming from what she loves in her personal life. She mentions the idea of, “ the beauty of being an artist, you have to do what’s good for you and what you’re thinking about. And do what is important and relevant to you and then later on, it’ll seep into the world the way it needs to seep into the world.” 

From the conversation with Asghar, I was very impressed by her. I think she is very brave to dive into the things that she likes and not afraid to put them together. Her sense of self and strong identity aid her artwork in a unique way. And able to let her works of art seep into the artworld by themselves in some ways. I think as a young artist myself, I would consider what kind of things that I truly love by my heart, and create art that would represent my identity. Also, before talking to her, I never really thought about whether I could include different kinds of elements into my works of art, because I am afraid that they would not look coherent together. By talking to her, I feel like I have the courage to truly dive into the things that I want to have in my works of art.