05/12/2026
Meet our May residents - May 18, 4-6pm at the York Public Library with Soulaf Abas , Dahn Gim , and Sharmistha Ray . Registration is free and open to the public - link in bio or at surfpoint.me/events.
Sharmistha Ray (they/them) is a visual artist and Estella Loomis McCandless Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Their artistic practice uses modes of abstraction to explore imagery related to Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies, the patterning and ornamentation of South Asian crafts, and sacred architecture in relationship to global modernisms and q***r futurity. In addition to their solo work, they co-founded the spiritualist feminist art collective Hilma’s Ghost which acts as a collaborative model for research, artistic production, pedagogy, and community.
Dahn Gim works through material transformation, altering and reassembling repurposed objects and personal archives to navigate shifting boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown. After completing her MFA from UCLA, she has exhibited internationally at venues including Somerset House (UK), Post Territory Ujeongguk and DDP (South Korea), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Hammer Museum, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Human Resources, Steve Turner Gallery (LA), Currents New Media (Santa Fe), Rochester Art Center, and Hair and Nails Gallery (Minneapolis/New York City).
Soulaf was born and raised in Damascus, Syria. In 2008 she received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Indiana State University. Then, she returned to Syria and taught art at the Arab European University. In 2010, Soulaf returned to Indiana State University to get her masters in Fine Arts then taught at Indiana State University. Soulaf went back to visit her family in Damascus-Syria in the summer of 2012, a year after the revolution began. Upon her return from Syria, she started creating images in painting and printmaking that depicted what she’d experienced. She continues to explore the effects of loss and trauma in her oil painting and printmaking works.
