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Curator: Mohasses' mixed-media collage work is a strange and evocative portrait, its layers speaking to fractured identities and distorted perspectives. Editor: There’s an eerie beauty in this collage, in its texture. It feels unsettling, as though peering into a distorted reality built from remnants. What process and materials went into making something so deliberately unsettling? Curator: The "how" of it is crucial. Mohasses' method reflects a deliberate destruction of traditional form; it mirrors the socio-political ruptures within the cultural context. The torn pieces create a sense of unease and reflect a kind of forced fragmentation that can be aligned to diaspora and identity. Editor: Exactly. By deconstructing recognizable forms through collage, there's an engagement with labor and production that makes the figure. I’m interested in the original context of the images he selected. Were these sourced from specific locations? Is there meaning behind their individual construction? Curator: Yes, the source materials matter. The figure—feminine, perhaps—appears incomplete, reconstructed. This suggests to me the ways in which dominant cultures appropriate and fragment identities, and the impact it leaves behind, resulting in fractured and assembled versions of the original self. Editor: I agree completely, it reflects that consumption of media, reshaping images from disparate elements into new formations. Curator: Precisely! Mohasses utilizes a language of both resistance and deconstruction to address the struggles that have historically existed as it pertains to visibility and being within different cultural spheres. Editor: So it moves beyond a visual piece—the selection and tearing of material are actions loaded with cultural commentary, critiquing artifice, while at the same time making a comment on commercialized portraiture and the labor in manufacturing ideals. I find this so revealing and clever! Curator: It is a revealing work. It encourages us to critically consider not only what we are looking at, but also why it evokes such emotion. It opens to discourse on politics, gender, identity, and representation in portraiture—to see these figures and how that mirrors their place within art history itself. Editor: Definitely. This deep dive makes me see how he utilized not only material construction, but how it becomes commentary about social construct. Thank you for opening my eyes more widely. Curator: Absolutely. I'm pleased this conversation allows deeper reflection on identity, medium and message, because Mohasses invites critical interpretations on representation and more!