Ashna Sheikh

This painting as a whole is about choosing to curate your life based on societal expectations or living as your own person and still feeding into the expectations of an alternative lifestyle. Despite being a second generation immigrant, this painting is not about how I have many different expectations from both being a Canadian and an immigrant. This painting is about our [my] ancestors who were expected to be ladies and how that affects newer generations. One could even say it is about intergenerational knowledge in an unconventional way. The two women depicted are dancing in a ballroom. These two women are supposed to be very similar– if not the same person– and they are both supposed to reflect a traditional versus non traditional way of living. In the past, women weren’t expected to fight in the military, they weren’t expected to lead in dances, or have short hair, but the woman on the right does just that. The woman on the left has that long hair, she is not leading in the dance, and she is rather nonchalant compared to the other person. None of them are unhappy with their lifestyles. To me, this represents the different lifestyles I feel like I’m constantly surrounded by. One is much closer to how my ancestors lived than the other so one feels much more secure than the other but at the end of the day, I feel like they both hold their own merits and represent different sides of both my history and myself.