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SAFI ALIA SHABIK (ARTIST)
Safi Alia Shabik was born and raised in Los Angeles. She discovered her visual voice at the early age of five in a children’s pinhole camera class at the California Museum of Science and Industry. She earned her B.A. with honors in Fine Art at UCLA, where she was nominated for the Levinson Scholarship and studied with many accomplished contemporary artists, including Catherine Opie, Richard Jackson, Paul McCarthy, Barbara Drucker, and Mark Durant. She has lived and worked in both Los Angeles and New York. While living in NY, she became a fashion stylist, photographic documentarian, personal assistant, travel companion, and confidante to the legendary and iconic Ms. Grace Jones, both in her personal and public life. Safi’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Black+White Photography, Lenscratch, Alta Journal, Catalyst: Interviews, CameraCraft, VoyageLA, The Advocate, Edge Of Humanity Magazine, Upworthy.com, and in Grace Jones’s book: I'll Never Write My Memoirs. She has been featured on The Candid Frame (episode #465), and her work has earned her recognition in PhotoLucida’s Critical Mass Top 50. In collaboration with the Parkinson’s Foundation, Safi is the proud recipient of a Visual Arts Grant from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). She is the first (ever) recipient of the Las Fotos Project Foto Award for Self-Expression, presented by the Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles. Her work is in several private collections, and she has exhibited in both solo and group shows in galleries across the nation.

Website:https://flashbulbfloozy.com

Instagram: @Flashbulbfloozy

Life and education
Safi Alia Shabaik first became interested in art and photography when her mother enrolled her in a pinhole camera class at the California Museum of Science and Industry when she was a child. She attended UCLA and graduated with honors with a B.A. in Fine Art. She has worked as a fashion stylist and a photographic documentarian since then, and she has lived in both New York and Los Angeles. Catherine Opie became her mentor after college, while she was still in Los Angeles, and taught her the art of large-scale color printing in her custom-built darkrooms. Safi became a fashion stylist, photographic documentarian, personal assistant, travel companion, and confidante to the legendary icon, Ms. Grace Jones, in both her personal and public life while in New York. Safi was given carte blanche to photograph whenever she pleased.

Artist Statement

"Throughout my life, my work has explored identity, persona, subculture, and the humanity of all people. My work investigates worlds that the viewer may never choose to enter or know exist … worlds that might push boundaries, thresholds, or be regarded as culturally unacceptable parts of life. I explore this subject matter to enlighten myself and my viewers about the fact that, underneath it all, we are all human. We must choose to open our eyes and expand our minds to understand and embrace difference. Once we do, walls that divide us will crumble; we will recognize the humanity in each of us and feel a common bond. When we feel connected we have a larger capacity for understanding and love"- Safi

'Safi Alia Shabik is not only an artist who captures incredible moments from various parts of life through what she has gone through in her own life, but she also showcases the beauty within different cultures and allows them to shine to their full potential.

Career
'Safi's desire to create is not one she can suppress. She explains that "If I don’t express, I will wilt – so even with the desire there, that doesn’t mean it’s an easy road to produce quality work." There are definite challenges and growth spurts within the creative process … and creative blockage occurs intermittently and can feel endless at times. Safi just has to push through and keep creating … allow them to make bad work to get to the next phase which is the powerful work. Everything Safi makes is a stepping-stone in the evolution of her own body of work.

Her art takes form through various mediums – usually through photography, collage, and experimental video; sometimes through sculpture, printmaking, or drawing. Throughout her life, the backbone of her work has been an exploration of identity and persona.

Light of her photographic work expands on that with the inclusion of various subcultures and strives to present the humanity of all people. She is drawn to individuals who live outside of the norm and use external creative expression – such as costume, culture, ritual, alter-egos, etc. – to find acceptance and community. With subject matter ranging from the self to street to subculture to the extremely vulnerable collaboration with her father, her work investigates worlds that the viewer may never choose to enter or even know to exist … worlds that might push boundaries, thresholds, or be regarded as culturally unacceptable parts of life. She intends to explore this subject matter to bring to light that, underneath it all, we are all human.

Her collage work is an investigation into the subconscious as well as a look at the relationship between anatomical appropriation, objects, and culturally infused meaning. She prefers to work in analog form rather than digital manipulation. The collages' many different parts are physically clipped from various sources and publications, mostly women's magazines, so the imagery tends to implicitly explore and question gender roles and societal expectations – forms of identity. These collages frequently exist only at the moment when all of the loose-leaf parts come together. She refers to these as "Transient Collages." "I document them with my camera in their new formation but don't always make them permanent with adhesive, so they then get disassembled and can now be seen," she explained. Abstractly, She thinks there is a metaphor in working this way: the loose-leaf parts of the collage themselves mimic the search for identity that she plays within the actual imagery, but these clipped out images might never truly find their meaning (since they are never glued down) … or perhaps another way to interpret it would be that they keep experiencing new meaning and metamorphosis since they get disassembled and reused through time – much like one’s journey of shifting roles and self-definition over the course of a lifetime. Regarding her experimental videos, which are visual metaphors for her life experiences. They are mostly made with a Fisher-Price PixelVision Camera – occasionally with a Super8 film camera – and return us to themes of self, identity, and persona. She would occasionally make super crude stop-motion animations of certain transient collages – done in the traditional style of shooting multiple still images with my camera and then animating them like a film strip or flipbook.

She is drawn to people who present themselves in unusual or unexpected ways, who may be considered outcasts in their own culture, or who are the underdogs. She was born breech and has always been a little out of the ordinary, so perhaps she instinctively identifies with those who are a little (or a lot) out of the ordinary. In search of a community of nonconformists. Her parents instilled in her at a young age an appreciation for the beauty of difference and individuality, which has shaped her as an adult and heavily influenced her creative subject matter and visual voice.

The New York Times, Black+White Photography, Lenscratch, Alta Journal, Catalyst: Interviews, CameraCraft, VoyageLA, The Advocate, Edge Of Humanity Magazine, Upworthy.com, and Grace Jones' book: I'll Never Write My Memoirs have all featured Safi's work. Her work has been featured on The Candid Frame (episode #465), and she has been named to PhotoLucida's Critical Mass Top 50. Safi is the proud recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Grant in collaboration with the Parkinson's Foundation (NEA). She is the first (and only) recipient of the Las Fotos Project Foto Award for Self-Expression from the Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles.

Later, her work turned as she was to find her father had been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. Personality Crash: Portraits of My Father Who Suffered from Advanced Stages of Parkinson’s Disease, Dementia, and Sundowner’s Syndrome is a riveting, collaborative body of work that explores the human condition from an intimate perspective, focusing on the last years of her father’s journey with the disease. The work presents her family's personal story but also serves as a universal reminder of what it means to be human.

She began collaborating with her father in late 2013 when he started to exhibit stronger external manifestations of Parkinson’s. The project continued for the next four years, through compounding afflictions of dementia and sundowner’s syndrome, until his death on January 1, 2018. This work became a journal of his remaining time here, as well as a story about family bonds, individual strength, courage, and perseverance through the betrayal of mind and body and the loss of basic faculties and autonomous function. With her involvement as primary caregiver and documentarian, they agreed to make this body of work to bring us closer together as illness pulled us worlds apart.

Safi shares that, The most challenging part of the collaboration was bearing witness to the intricacies of her father’s decline. He had been her protector, champion, and role model, who seemed indestructible in her eyes. "In his last year, my father had increasing moments of confusion, hallucination, and disorientation. I literally parented my parent and would go to all ends to guarantee his visibility and dignity in the world". - Safi

Safi Alia Shabaik is an integrative artist and photographer based in Los Angeles, California. She has worked on a variety of projects in her professional career and is now a workshop instructor at the Los Angeles Center of Photography. She is also commissioned for fine art prints, portrait sessions, and nightlife documentation throughout the city. Her series 'Personality Crash,' which documents her father's Parkinson's disease experience, will be shown in Chicago and Los Angeles in Spring 2023.

Notable Moments

 * The University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art, Magna Cum Laude
 * American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Service, New York, Diploma of Funeral Service, Summa Cum Laude
 * AWARDS + RECOGNITION
 * 2021 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant for Art Projects: Visual Arts • collaboration with the Parkinson's Foundation for exhibiting *Personality Crash" in Los Angeles and Chicago
 * 2020 PHOTO LUCIDA: CRITICAL MASS TOP 50 Photographer • recognized for "Personality Crash"
 * 2019 Las Fotos Project Foto Award for Self-Expression, Presented by Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles, First (ever) Awardee
 * 2019 / SHOT IT Photography Competition, Mark Of Excellence
 * 2015 Photographer's Forum: 2015 Best of Photography, Finalist
 * 2014 Photographer's Forum: 2014 Best of Photography, Finalist
 * 2013 International Photography Awards, Honorable Mention
 * 1997 Lillian Levinson Scholarship. Nominee SPECIAL FEATURES
 * 2022 How Artist Safi Alia Shabaik Captured Her Father's Parkinson's Disease by Sarah McGrath, Parkinson's Life UK
 * 2022 Safi Alia Shabaik: Love Letters To Life In The City + Vespertine Beings, X-POSURE Magazine for Photographers (Turkey) • Vol 2, Issue 01
 * 2021 American Connection: Susan Burnstine talks to Safi Alia Shabaik, Black + White Photography UK • Issue 251 (April)
 * 2021 Covid Projects: Safi Alia Shabaik PIECES: a pandemic story of self by Aline Smithson, LENSCRATCH: Fine Art Photography Daily
 * 2021 A Year Like No Other (How Photographers Across The West Saw 2020) Lives Of The Artists by Mary Melton, Alta Journal
 * 2020 Safi Alia Shabaik: Artist & Photographer by Shoutout LA Staff, Shoutout LA
 * 2019 Outside Of The Norm, Edge Of Humanity Magazine
 * 2019 Podcast Episode 465: Safi Alia Shabaik in conversation with Ibarionex Perello for The Candid Frame, CA
 * 2019 Los Angeles Underground: Photographer Safi Alia Shabaik is there to capture it all by Beth Spotswood, Alta Journal
 * 2019 Check Out Safi Alia Shabaik's Artwork by VoyageLA Staff, VoyageLA
 * 2018 Guest Artist: Safi Alia Shabaik, Irish Art Now, Northern Ireland
 * 2018 Catalyst. Interview with Safi Alia Shabaik by Michael Kirchoff, Catalyst: Interviews
 * 2018 Lens: Tenderly Photographing the End of Her Father's Life by Jonathan Blaustein, New York Times
 * 2018 Member in the Spotlight: Safi Alia Shabaik, Los Angeles Center of Photography
 * 2018 Safi Alia Shabaik: Photographs For Future Anthropologists by Gary L. Friedman, CameraCraft • Issue No 21 (March/April)
 * 2017 Her Striking Photos of Her Father Capture the Struggles and Rewards of Being a Caregiver by Gabe Rivin, Upworthy.com
 * 2015 Featured Member of the Month: Safi Alia Shabaik, Los Angeles Center of Photography
 * 2015 Dia De Los Muertos by Ebony Bailey, Los Angeles Times: Southern California Moments (Blogzine) GROUP EXHIBITIONS
 * 2021 California Love: A Visual Mixtape • Part 2, The Hive Gallery, Los Angeles, CA • Curator: Michael Rababy