The Edith Renfrow Smith `37 Gallery begins wrapping up the semester with its second-to-last show — “Not Home.” Hosting art by A’ishah Mokrani `27, the theme of “Not Home” focuses on various aspects of what “home,” and as Mokrani says, “not home” represents.
The gallery includes paintings on canvas and directly onto wallpaper applied to the rear wall of the gallery. The paintings are based around scenes of night time, food and places in Algeria. “I grew up in Algeria, but then I also had a part of my childhood in the States. I used to go to my grandparents a lot, and they live almost completely off the grid, like super-duper rural. [And] going to Algeria, very different cultures, I would say,” she said.
Despite multiple settings and scenes, the overall focus on most of the pieces, Mokrani said, are the single-second moments where things feel “off.”
“Even though it’s a familiar space, suddenly they’re unfamiliar,” she said. “It’s kind of about those really weird moments when even though you’re at home, it doesn’t feel like home.”
“I feel like in your everyday life, things feel very ordinary and mundane. To me, I think there are these moments — they only last maybe a second or a couple of seconds — where everything feels just off, and then it’s gone and you’re back to ‘Oh, my home.’ This is something I know is usual to me,” she said.
One of Mokrani’s paintings depicts a Taco Bell restaurant. It is set at night, with a ring of light and a windy path in a foggy night that leads to the restaurant. “When I was a kid, me and my family used to go to Taco Bell a lot, because it was just very inexpensive at the time, and we have a big family … my grandparents live almost completely off the grid, very country.” she said.
“When you’re driving through the Redwoods, it’s incredibly windy, [a] very dense forest,” she said, referring to the tall redwood trees that grow along the Pacific coast from California to Oregon. “You’re driving and you look up for a second and you see this crazy thing, and then in the next second, it’s gone. And you can’t even really describe it because, like, what are you gonna tell people? [It’s] almost like lightning flash.”
“I think it was just kinda like that creepiness again. So, just remembering that, and going on these late night drives to go to Taco Bell,” Mokrani said.
Another of the paintings that Mokrani finds surreal is the one of a mosque. With rainfall in front of a glowing lamp post, the scene is set once again at night. “I do have a very specific memory of me and my dad and my brother. We went to the north, the coast of Algeria to go to the beach. And on our way home, it’s in the mountains a little bit, and we stopped at a little mosque. So I kinda feel a connection to that. It also — because it’s at night — reminds me of Ramadan,” Mokrani said, referring to the Muslim practice of fasting from dawn to sunset during the month of Ramadan. “A lot of the time, because people fast during the day, people will usually sleep through the day and then get up at night and go and do their activities.”
Mokrani said that mosques were another set of surreal spaces for her, despite its familiarity. “At least when I think of mosques, I think of something kind of big and very decorated,” she said. “But sometimes when you’re on a road trip in Algeria, you’ll kind of just stop for the prayer, and sometimes you’ll look at the mosque and you won’t even realize that it’s a mosque at first … It’s kind of one of those moments where it’s just something that’s kind of out of your ‘normal.’”
Mokrani added that she also wanted to use food to invoke nostalgia in her works. A smaller painting on the wall portrays a round dining table with two cakes — a brown cake and a pink cake with candles and frosting. She said that this painting was based on a scene from a cartoon program she used to watch as a kid, “Max & Ruby.”
“There’s an older sister and a little brother. It’s their grandma’s birthday or something, and so the sister makes this really beautiful cake. And then the brother kinda makes, it’s like a mud cake, a messed-up kinda cake,” she said. “Those cakes are actually the two cakes from the show. So it’s that same nostalgia, because it reminds me of that cartoon.”
Mokrani wanted to take a step further in emphasizing the surreality of nostalgia for such mundane events through her physical setup of the gallery. Part of her art was physically painted onto brown wallpaper, specifically, a window and curtains, and on the white wall paint, a chair and a stool with a drawer. Across, in the middle of the floor, a table holds a television, turned off.
Mokrani said she wanted it to feel like a living room. “You will see that the TV is kinda directed towards the sitting area,” she said, adding that she had planned to have a real chair, but settled for a life-sized drawing instead. “But I kinda like that too, because I feel that it kinda adds to the eeriness a little bit,” she said. “Some elements are real and then some elements are fake.”
The gallery first opened on Monday, Nov. 17. It will remain open until Saturday, Dec. 6.
Lisa Walker • Dec 4, 2025 at 5:52 pm
A’ishah is an incredible artist and an extraordinary person. I’m not surprised that is making a splash at Grinnell.