Arts Fort Worth presents "You Speak English Too Well," featuring works from artist Boryana Rusenova-Ina. According to the artist, her current project is grounded in her formative experiences of learning English as a second language in post-communist Bulgaria. She said back then, writing was drawing and drawing was writing, and now they both have also become painting.

The artist finds the intersection between language and identity, and how the former signifies the latter, to be a constant source of curiosity. Most recently, this has been embodied in her young, bi-lingual children and their attempts at drawing out words. The impulse to assign meaning to their scribbles is a precursor to written language and language is another form of cultural capital. She sees their marks as an expression of something that is not yet learned but in the process of becoming so. To preserve this state of flux, she copied their scribbles and early writings in a series of trompe l’oeil paintings titled "This Is the Way to Macke a Hart."

For Boryana, copying is a generative act; She copies to remind herself of the power of their uncontrived marks and of what comes before becoming fully set into a sense of self and place. The shapes of mountains in the paintings are based on surveillance camera footage of Mt. Rushmore Memorial when the camera displaces the figures of the four presidents to randomly capture the edges of the mountain. Referencing Mt. Rushmore as only rocks and sky brings back associations to its previous history as a landscape not yet inscribed by a national ethos. Pairing these seemingly unrelated subjects together creates a space, both material and figurative, in which people can ruminate on the influence of a powerful symbol of national capital against a child’s developing awareness of self.

Following the opening reception, the exhibit will be on view through July 29.