Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and New Haven. Through a diverse range of media, Zhang explores how histories of translation, migration, and memory leave traces and impressions. Her work examines the processes of integration and assimilation, the ways culture is learned, sustained, and negotiated, how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences and how symbols and icons are remembered and preserved. Zhang’s recent work investigates the surface as a charged site where connections between the decorative, ornamentation, cinematic surfaces, and skin are projected, learned, and inherited. Working across materials such as light, metal, found objects, and glass, she explores how these surfaces operate as perceptual thresholds, embedded with anxieties around gender, race, and sexuality beneath their ornate veneers. Drawing on symbols from both natural and urban worlds, she examines how decorative surfaces carry the potential to transform and metamorphose from their encrusted histories. Recent projects have focused on elusive surfaces in the nature and hostile ornamentals—plants that were imported for decorative purposes that have since been classified as threatening or invasive. Through researching the adaptability of the natural world, she is interested in presenting decorative surfaces as a site of inscrutability—one that eludes full knowability and instead suggests a depth or vibration beneath what is often perceived as flat or hollow.