That Which Forms

Mariam Aziza Stephan

Featuring poems by Julia Johnson

Exhibition Opening: September 4, 5-8 p.m.

Exhibition Dates: September 4-October 18, 2026

Artist Statement

My drawings individualize the landscape as portraits carrying their histories in haunting and stark images. Being able to name particular images as metonymies of transience and evolution creates landmarks that are not only geographical references but also biographical, personal, and historical. This is a process of understanding the way in which I know and am continually knowing the world. Knowing is always in motion, a layering of fragments and impressions that shift as I return to them. To reflect on how I know is to recognize that vision itself is not passive but active, a shaping force that determines what is seen and how it is remembered. The work of representation, then, is inseparable from this ongoing process of knowing: each image is both a historical record and a telling or narration, both a recognition and a questioning of what we claim to see. In this way, my drawings share an affinity with the writing of history, which is itself a continual act of re-presenting the past, assembling fragments into forms that both reveal and conceal. Trusting the value and accretion of indexical marks is akin to a research methodology. It recognizes that the artists presence is sometimes mitigated by illusion and the comfort of recognition. I believe that to represent aspects of the world around us that we need to consider more than what our eyes apprehend at any one given moment. 

I have been collaborating on a poetry project of image/poems for the past few years that is loosely structured using the Earth as a protagonist enduring centuries of exploits. Since 2018, poet Julia Johnson has been writing poems in response to my work for a long term book project emblematic of Der Krieg Dem Krieg (War Against War! by Ernst Friedrich, a German pacifist who attempted to rally people against war by showing its atrocities, and Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War, etchings and related text which condemn the cyclical nature of humankind's inhumanity to one another. Exhibitions of my drawings include the poems with each image that Johnson has completed: once written, I consider them the title of the work. This collaboration has since expanded to a longer poetic form in conversation with my tree drawings.

About the Artists

Mariam Aziza Stephan

Mariam Aziza Stephan,born in Pittsburgh, PA, earned her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA in Painting from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work has been exhibited domestically and abroad including the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Mobile Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, and the Gezira Art Center in Cairo, Egypt, and is included in the permanent collections of the Raleigh Municipal Art Collection, Raleigh; the Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama; and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, Cairo, Egypt. Stephan has received awards including the 2018 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Award and served as a 2010-11 Fulbright Scholar to Egypt, and is Professor of Painting at UNC Greensboro.

Learn more at: www.mariamstephan.com

Julia Johnson

Julia Johnson, a native of New Orleans, earned a B.A. from Hollins College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. Prior to joining the faculty at UK, she taught at Hollins University, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Johnson is the author of Naming the Afternoon, published by Louisiana State University Press, which won the George Garrett Fellowship of Southern Writers New Writing Award, The Falling Horse, published by Factory Hollow Press, and most recently Subsidence. She served as editor of Mississippi Review, including a special issue on The Prose Poem, as well as an anthology, 30 years of Mississippi Review. She edited The Collected Poems of Jane Gentry. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Poetry International, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, jubilat, Tin House, and numerous other journals and anthologies. Julia Johnson is Professor of English and was the Founding Director of the new Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of Kentucky.