Artist Statement — Ivette Ramos Levy

I create art to reveal what is often unseen — the quiet emotions that live beneath the surface of identity, memory, and belonging.
As an immigrant and interdisciplinary art maker and visual artist living in Texas, my work grows from lived experience: the joy of adaptation, the ache of displacement, and the complex beauty of existing between cultures.

Over the years, I have learned that the act of making is also an act of healing.
Through painting, ceramics, installation, and video, I transform materials and images that are both hard and fragile — clay, porcelain, thread, canvas, paper, and light — into testaments of resilience.
Each piece becomes a way to reclaim voice, to touch what has been silenced, and to invite others into that shared vulnerability.

My practice is also inspired by my readings of Carl Jung, particularly his reflections on the shadow and the abyss within the self.
These ideas mirror my process, which often begins in uncertainty and evolves toward transformation through creation.
Like Jung’s vision of confronting the hidden aspects of the psyche, my art seeks to bring light to what has been denied or repressed — giving form to emotions and memories that live quietly beneath the surface.

In my installations and throughout my ongoing series New People, eyes reappear as a recurring symbol of expanded awareness and memory — witnesses of human fragility and the invisible judgments that shape how we see one another and ourselves.
Whether through painting, sculpture, ceramics, or moving images, I return to this language of the gaze: eyes that hold remembrance, threads that connect past and present, and masks that reveal as much as they conceal.
These motifs form a vocabulary of empathy, born from a personal need to make sense of being seen, misunderstood, and still present.

My current project, Under the Gaze, continues this exploration through a new installation built from dozens of ceramic eyes — a work that deepens my commitment to transforming observation into empathy.

While my work is rooted in personal experience, it extends beyond autobiography.
I see art as a way to connect — to build bridges between individual and collective stories, between vulnerability and strength.
Ultimately, I want my art to slow people down.
To make them see, feel, and reflect — not only on what they observe, but on how they observe.
If my work allows someone to recognize a part of themselves in the experience of another, then it has fulfilled its purpose.