Born in Lebanon, Seeroon received her formal training at the Beirut University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the Otis/Parsons Art Institute. She has held exhibitions at the UCLA Kerchoff Gallery, the Wilshire Ebell, and the Otis/Parsons Gallery, and last year her work was featured at the J. Paul Getty Museum's Armenian and Iranian art festivals.
Her latest paintings and illustrations suggest a terse, often enigmatic discourse across art-historical references, thematic platforms and design elements. Yeretzian is as comfortable in exploring the limits of formal cross-pollination as she is insistent on packing the socially and politically conscious punch: The trauma of the Armenian Genocide continues to ripple through a sober attempt at poeticizing collective grief; images of violence against women, emotional and otherwise, and in novel guises, seem to crash on facile notions of legal equality; and the appalling living conditions of the homeless and those struggling on the fringes of the American Dream spawn on vision of the postmodern metropolis as breeding ground for widening strife and contradiction.
To Yeretzian, Los Angeles is the ultimate metaphor for the nomadic experience. As much a fatally magnetic destination for the displaced as an experimentation in multicultural destiny-making, the sprawling city at the extreme edge of the Western tradition is all about the nightmare made flesh along suburban grid lines and a systemic barrage of hypertechnology. Yeretzian's human figures, often faceless and resembling three dimensional models etched on computer screens, find themselves situated in terrifying landscapes of psychic confusion, seething with loneliness. Man and shadow seem to be the only reliable mutual references, even when among groups, while a crucified human figure, with electronic metal-and-wire gadgets serving as hands, is not a human at all but an android now dismantling the most cherished of myths.
But Yeretzian goes beyond the narrative, certainly beyond the didactic, to register her critique within the larger project of a spirituality against the tide. This is her way of subverting the slew of social injustices, the violence, cultural serialization and sheer angst of the fin-de-siecle: by both keeping the discontent alive and seeking the signifiers of transcendence behind the field of action, she is busy embracing both as interlocking forces of life affirmation.
Yeretzian's spirituality comes in an amplitude of iconography spanning the very length of world art. She plumbs the depths of Armenian illuminated manuscripts and prehistoric cave paintings, as well as the imagery of the Renaissance masters, as though to snatch swaths of wisdom from the symbol, and then welds the lot into an abstract expressionist impulse that ultimately serves to synthesize and enlighten rather than hawk an eclecticism for its own sake. Perhaps it's this openness to the archetypes and sources of pure form, coupled with an exceptional mastery of color, that gives Yeretzian's art its quality of knowing exuberance. Even in the most intellectually taxing of works, where conglomerations of skulls, forlorn truth seekers and crucified urbanites would, at first sight, exact reactions of impotent melancholy, what in truth takes hold is a sense of esthetic soothing, passionate and many-tiered silence vis-a-vis the violence, that does much to elucidate Yeretzian's own brand of spirituality.
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