"Amalgamation" by Noah Haytin; "The Tower" by Khalid Hussein(Los Angeles, January 12, 2011) HYBRIDS is a dynamic new exhibition featuring two younger multimedia artists—Khalid Hussein and Noah Haytin—whose work explores power, identity and American and Middle Eastern ideologies. Both Hussein and Haytin express their creativity in strong colors and layered textures. What if Francis Bacon were an Arab? Or Chagall a Moroccan? HYBRIDS will open at the Inside/Outside Gallery (Levantine Cultural Center), 6-10 pm, 5998 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90035, on January 28th, 2011. The two-man show runs through February 28, 2011.

Khalid Hussein (1985) works in a variety of media from oil painting to sculpture installation, with emphasis on representations of race, identity, history, and violence. His paintings imitate the continuously inhabited cities of the ancient world, superimposing multiple images, styles and cultural referents on top of one another in palimpsest-like layers. He constructs paintings over paintings, allowing the incomplete erasure and replacement of one with the other to create deliberate and automatic effects of visual tension and unexpected harmony. Traditional cultural forms, abstract tiles and arabesques, seep into images drawn from daily news, propaganda, and commercial marketing, collapsing the temporal barriers between past and present, east and west. Hussein suggests that he approaches the image as a historiographer, allowing background and foreground, body and geography to meet, compete, and coexist on a single plane.

Noah Haytin (1975) is a Bay Area-born mixed media artist who currently lives and works in both California and Morocco. This unique cross-cultural perspective informs Haytin's work. Eastern and Western iconography, globalization and the complexities of identity are themes he addresses. Utilizing a layering aesthetic and images from traditional drawing, painting and photography, Haytin creates collages that are not only whimsical and light, but also disquieting, reflecting global security issues. Haytin is a recipient of the 2010 Fulbright-Hays Grant and has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally. Originally from California and now working internationally, his work has been exhibited at venues such as The Armory Show in New York, 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica, the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, as well as at several galleries in the Kingdom of Morocco. Well-known artists, curators and critics have singled out Haytin's work, among them Kim Abeles, Michael Duncan, Peter Frank, Ronald Lopez, Chris Miles, Tyler Stallings, & Michelle Urton.

Hussein was born in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to an Egyptian (naturalized American) Sunni Muslim father and a Minnesotan American mother of Swedish and Norwegian origins, and Lutheran Christian upbringing. And life did not get any less confusing from there. He grew up nomadically traveling between the U.S. and the Middle East, receiving an informal education at home. He finally settled in California and has since received a BA in Fine Art and MA in Islamic Studies from UCLA. Hussein now lives in Los Angeles, earning his daily bread as a freelance translator, consultant, tutor, and a designer for the emerging urban apparel brand, Revolutionary Me.

Khalid Hussein has shown his paintings at the Outer Edge gallery (2005), in Monterey California, the Monterey Museum of Art (2005), and the Atelier Deluxe Musique gallery (2006) in Hollywood. He has also participated in a number of minor group shows and online exhibitions. Through an assortment of imagery Hussein presents a visual essay of politics, society, spirituality and multicultural identity. Juxtaposing images referenced from photography, fine art and print, Hussein paints a montage of complex layers that effortlessly fuse together into one cohesive piece, resulting in a bold and vibrant composition. Hussein's work can also evoke an undertone of darkness and violence, an attribute that he believes is contingent in the creation of power.

Gliding between Morocco and the U.S., Noah Haytin lives between worlds. "I often experience visibility, invisibility, and slippage in and out of social constructs like ethnicity and culture," Haytin says. "My experience has made me keenly aware of and fascinated with the fluid nature of identity. I respond by collaging media in a menagerie of lost and found imagery from traditional drawing and painting to the digital domain. The modern and the ancient are juxtaposed in the process."

Mosaics, or zelige (as tiles and tile work are called in Derija, the Moroccan spoken dialect of Arabic), are an integral part of the Moroccan aesthetic. It is often said in Morocco that traditional zelige compositions reflect the infinity of God. Morocco itself is a mosaic of cultural influences and traditions that form a mesmerizing feast for the senses. "As an ‘outsider' who is at times taken to be or considered an ‘insider' in Morocco as well as a 21st-century cultural worker," Haytin says, "I am enthralled by the coexistence of antiquity, modernity, indigenous traditions, foreign influences, and the innovations of contemporary artists who meld personal vision to age-old cultural constructs."

Morocco's ability to synthesize seeming contrarieties, its spiritual zelige, has made it a haven for artists and intellectuals, native and foreign, for centuries. Like Hussein, Haytin sometimes uses local detritus for collage. He uses traditional materials such as henna powder mixed with pigment, blending these with more typical mixed media: acrylic paint, graphite, pen and ink. Haytin's palette, reflecting the desert sands, sky, and foliage, ranges from earth tone to polychromatic. Evocative of hallucination, dreams, shifting identities, dislocation, dissolution, recalling the impact of North African culture on the work of Mediterranean masters like Matisse and Dalí, Haytin's art conveys the visceral experience of a "Westerner" in 21st century Morocco.

About the Inside/Outside Gallery

Addressing a void in the American art world, Inside/Outside Gallery is the first gallery in the United States to specialize in presenting contemporary Arab/Middle Eastern artists. Inside/Outside seeks to challenge Orientalist stereotypes by providing the general public with both a physical and online location to view/appreciate art that is representative of the diversity and evolving cultural identity of the Arab/Muslim world and its growing diaspora.