Meet Renee Billingslea

Renee Billingslea works with the camera, the needle and the archive.  Each project begins in research:  a historical photograph, a story heard on the radio, a name missing from the record.  From there she builds photographs and objects that hold what she finds, stitching by hand directly into the print.  

Her newest body of work, The Dahlia Project: Flowers for Aragon, turns toward beauty while keeping history close.  She photographs dahlias at full bloom against black then returns to each print with needle and thread. 

In her own words:

"There exists a remarkable parallel between the histories of the dahlia and the stitching tradition.  Both emerged as expressions of beauty and perhaps, a way to find inner peace." 

Billingslea holds a BFA from Souther Oregon University and an MFA in photography from San Jose State University.  She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kiribati.  She is Teaching Professor of Photography at Santa Clara University and lives in Santa Clara with her husband, the actor Aldo Billingslea. 

Meet Pantea Karimi

Pantea Karimi's grandmother was the family herbalist, and her mother, a history teacher, first drew her toward art.  Both inhertiances are visible in everything she makes.  Based in San Jose since 2005, after ealier years in Iran and Endland, Karimi reads old manuscripts the way a botanist reads a field, placing medieval and early modern scientific texts in conversation with her own experience as an Iranian American immigrant.

Many of her plant forms come from The Herval, a 12th-century Andalusian manuscript by the physician al-Ghafiqi. She renders them in layered prints that combine drawing, ink, silkscreen, watercolor and monotype, often over marbled paper, a plant based technique developed in medieval Iran and long used to decorate books. 

Pantea Karimi, Saffron Crocus, Gold Petal iii, Marbling and silkscreen on BFK Rives Paper, 2024, 22x 30 in. 

Saffron Crocus, Gold Petal iii holds a whole trade route on one sheet.  The ground is hand marbled, pigment floated on water and lifted onto paper, a technique carried through centuries of Persian and Ottoman bookmaking.  Blue scallops ripple across it like tilework, veined in coral and black.  Over that ground Karimi paints the saffron crocus in gold and copper, stems rising, buds tipping open, petals catching the real light the way gilding does in an old manuscript.  The flower is the point.  Native to Iran, harvested by hand between dusk and dawn it yields the most precious spice in the world, and Karimi grew up with it's color and scent in the kitchen.  Here she gives it the treatment illuminators once reserved for saints:  gold leaf on marbled heaven.