about the artist
Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez (she/her, b. 1988) creates poetic installations that merge glass, neon, imagery, and text, drawing from her Puerto Rican and Persian heritage. She was the inaugural winner of the Adele and Leonard Leight Award from the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY) and has held residencies at Blue Mountain Center, MASS MoCA, Pilchuck Glass School, and the Corning Museum of Glass, among others. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Craft and Design, Traver Gallery, Tacoma Museum of Glass, BWA Wrocław, and Glasmuseet Ebeltoft. Passionate about social change and arts education, she previously directed the Bead Project at UrbanGlass, supporting femmes from diverse backgrounds in learning glasswork. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia, PA), where she earned her BFA, and holds an MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA).
I handcraft neon lights as well as solid and blown glass objects to tell stories from familial history and personal experience. My use of light references the notion of the eternal light of the soul, an inner flame possessed by each person that infinitely endures. I have also come to see this light as a metaphor for the pouring and receiving of unconditional love, gestures that surpass all distance and obstacles. My poetry and prose are used to guide the work and reference the nuanced joys and sorrows of friendship, family ties and romantic relationships.
I play with materials to transfigure lived experience into a redeemed dreamscape. Although my sculptures and installations are ultimately mixed-media, glass and neon appear in my work most. I am allured by the rich color that glows from within both materials, making them deeply alive and present, sometimes even buzzing. The ability of glass and neon to capture an aesthetic range from whimsical to exacting makes them ideal for translating metaphors in my writing.
The aesthetic of the objects I make and the ways in which they are arranged are informed by my cultural identity as an American woman with Persian and Puerto Rican heritage. I am inspired by the Zoroastrian haftsin, a table of symbolic objects traditionally assembled in the household every spring equinox in celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year. In this context, normal objects like flowers, fruit, candles and mirrors express complex themes of identity, luck, transformation and desire. Family heirlooms and stories from my parent’s immigration experience are also referred to in my work. These sources of fascination point to the ability physical objects have to carry coded meaning. They also show how objects, like experiences, can be fleeting. The springtime blooms and then bursts. Tokens of money and memory come and go, in a turning wheel of recycled energy.
