 Hi, welcome to my studio. My name is Nomi Safanhorn and I'm a painter. I make mixed-media work with cement and photographs and lace. My studio is in the Monty Building in Cown Heights. So this is an example of a small piece I made last week. I start with the photograph and I build the wood frame to match the size of the photograph and I mount the photograph onto the canvas. Then with an exacto knife I cut through the photograph into the canvas to make a hole and I stretched lace on the back and then on the floor elevated I pushed cement through the back to create this texture. Then I let it dry and it hardens. I use my own photograph that I take when I go home to visit my family in Haifa in Israel. In my own personal life it's hard for me to separate my own personal journey and the journey of what happened to the country I grew up in and that place. And so in a metaphorical way the cement references the political world, the brutality of it and the lace represents a domestic space and bringing those two together makes great attention. For me being in Brooklyn is being in this island of creativity surrounded by people who are engaged and ambitious and creative and I'm really happy to make work here and able to reflect both on the environment here around me and see the relationship between what I'm interested in and how it plays out in Brooklyn or in New York or in the US and thinking back about my home and its history and place.