Bio:
Qiana Mestrich (she/her) is a photography-focused, interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator based in Brooklyn and Saugerties, New York. Mestrich has been exhibited worldwide including the international Triennial RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt/RheinMain, the BRIC Biennial: Volume III and London Art Fair’s Photo50. Her work is held in the Peggy Cooper Cafritz collection of contemporary art and other private collections in the United States. In 2022, Mestrich was a recipient of the Magnum Foundation’s Counter Histories grant for her project ont he history of women of color in the corporate workplace.
Statement:
Working primarily within (auto)biography, my art practice incorporates photography, collage, writing, installation, search algorithms and the family album. To support myself and my children, I’ve simultaneously held a full-time corporate job in digital marketing while also pursuing an art career. I am constantly walking the tenuous tightrope of mothering, laboring and making art. My latest series of mixed-media collages, The Reinforcements (2023-ongoing), combines archival images from vintage fashion and office supply magazines with other clerical ephemera. this body of work has emerged from a larger project, “@WorkingWOC: Towards a History of Women of Color in the Workplace”, a community-driven archive visualizing the invisible labor of women of color in the American workforce. This project was inspired by images of my mother, who worked in sales at the Rugol Trading Corporation in the late 1960s in NYC.