Shami composes candy-toned oil paintings of jewelry-pierced vivacious flora accompanied by Y2K Arabic semiotics and more. Her oil paintings routinely combine the natural and unnatural. Flowers and objects are altered with piercings to enhance their symbolic powers as representations of female identity.
Kelly Shami (b. 1991, New Jersey) is a first-generation American artist of Syrian and Lebanese descent. She completed her B.F.A. from The School of Visual Arts in 2013. At SVA Shami became interested in depictions of women as objects and muses – rather than the creator herself, which she found paralleled in the restraints of growing up as an Arab woman. Inspired by female Surrealists like Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, and Frida Kahlo, Shami’s paintings routinely combine the natural and unnatural. Flowers altered with piercings enhance their symbolic power as representations of female identity. The piercings, a form of alteration she experimented with at a young age to feel in control, allow Shami's delicate oil paintings to exist as a series of complex self-portraits, while the expertly rendered metallic surfaces of the piercings create a mirrored effect that encourages self-reflection.