SHEREE HOVSEPIAN FRAGMENTS
Traces of the Female Form
Fragments of an arched back, an exposed hip, a bare shoulder: this is the beginning element of Sheree Hovsepian’s work. The artist starts with black-and-white photography, captured on a medium-format film camera. Poised and swan-like, the photography remains the cornerstone of her practice, but the work unravels and widens from there, giving way to performance and expanding into three dimensions — layers of cream, stretches of tan, and margins of wood brown. Hovsepian’s work reimagines the body of a woman, expanding upon contemporary photography and carrying the work forward with materials such as ceramics, nylon, string, and wood.
A person set between two worlds of ancestry and realized belonging, Hovsepian was born in Isfahan, Iran, and raised in northwest Ohio. Through fragmented imagery, Hovsepian explores the concept of the body as “a politically charged location”. Her sister Sonya has become her long-time muse and primary model, years of collaborative creation cementing a fluid bond between the two. In some ways, she now considers the work a loose form of self-portraiture, the line blurring between creator and subject as two become one.
Warmth and coolness coexist throughout Hovsepian’s oeuvre, a kind of stoic feminine divinity established in geometry and rounded collage. She harnesses the art of assemblage with ease, weaving string across images and playing with the concept of passing time and the labor of women. For Hovsepian, the process of additive building has always come naturally, the photograph a catalyst for a greater creative outcome that remains outside of the digital realm and instead rewards touch and handmade movement. “If you look closely at some of these photographs,” she tells MoMA, “you might find a fingerprint, or [a trace] of my physical handling of these objects.”
Sheree Hovsepian’s work is on view at the MoMA through Fall of 2026. For more information, visit their website here.
