Excerpts from mentor Suzanne Kanatsiz' report

Assya has broad conceptual interests spanning indigenous art forms, feminist performance and rhetoric, objects of ritual or magic... and “craft -­‐driven”, and “design-­‐driven” objects of beauty. As such, she cannot be categorized, nor compartmentalized in her art productivity...  In the video, she transformed her two-­dimensional figurative works into time-­based sequencing and moving collages. Adding collected sound to the images (that continually assemble and deconstruct), gave the work an eerie quality, implying narrative yet dissolving into unreasoned repetition... 

Assya produced ceramic “scrying mirrors” this semester. She made these as a reference to metaphysical objects of the past that could be used as divination tools to view future or even other planes of existence in the universe. Upon seeing her “scrying mirrors”, it was apparent she actually made objects that potentially house the metaphysical function as noted. They are quite powerful!...

Listening to Assya speak about [the work], they become fascinating demarcation points of her reality, driven by obsessive reasoning, and then subsequently deconstructed by compulsion. This paradoxical process she engages in is what makes Assya the interesting artist she is. I believe she will continue to progress, if she can digest critical analysis of her work and peer comments without sacrificing her strange, rather off-­‐beat production of art.