Ochi Projects is pleased to present no hablo, no habla, an online viewing room featuring works by b chehayeb. The viewing room will be featured on our website from June 1- July 6, 2021.

chehayeb’s paintings transcribe memories and sensory experiences into gesture, color and texture. Using oil paint and oil stick on panel, chehayeb records stories, as they exist in her memory, into largely abstracted visual language, punctuated by more direct iconography, where each painting represents a moment, or a feeling from the artist’s life.

In describing her process, chehayeb references Joan Didion’s essay On keeping a notebook, emphasizing the irrelevance of facts when recounting a memory and suggesting that the remembered is just as, if not more, valuable than what was. chehayeb explores the potential within misremembering and miscommunication as well as how these concepts relate to time, nostalgia, and identity. Employing the perspective of her own history and bi-cultural background–having grown up Mexican American in suburban Texas–chehayeb often incorporates stories, cultural references, or even traumas into her work, always alternating between representation and abstraction. City summer ritual, records some of the everyday-ness of the artist’s pandemic summer–fast food eaten outside, tennis rackets and loneliness–are all culled into shapes, colors, and brush strokes. Visual references and affective signifiers–a McDonald’s ‘M,’ a set of cowboy boots–punctuate a surface of otherwise abstracted forms and colors, mimicking the way a memory might actually occupy one’s thoughts. chehayeb’s work codes inner and intimate experiences into paintings that have a story to tell, that celebrate the details, the small moments in life, often forgotten, but ever critical in forming who we are and how we see the world.

b chehayeb is an artist in Brooklyn by way of Boston. She holds an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a BFA in Painting from the University of North Texas with studies in Creative Writing. Her work spans a wide range of media and focuses on the reconstruction of failed memories, specifically memories warped by nostalgia, gender and cultural hybridity. chehayeb has been awarded residencies with Mass MoCA, the Vermont Studio Center, and most recently the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency Award in Upstate New York. In addition to being a finalist for the Hopper Prize Grant, chehayeb was awarded the New York City Redbull Arts Microgrant in 2020. Her works have been published and exhibited both nationally and internationally including Maake Magazine, Art Maze Magazine and The Hopper Prize Journal.