Join us for the opening reception of Dear You, Dear Me (Mailbox Series) featuring new work by Shabnam K. Ghazi.

The Mailbox Series is an ongoing body of work that explores themes of migration, displacement, and the search for belonging. Composed of handcrafted mirrored mailboxes, each piece serves as a vessel for reflection—both literal and metaphorical—inviting viewers to consider the personal and collective narratives carried across borders.

It wasn’t until after my immigration that I began to notice the mailbox as a recurring form—a quiet, ubiquitous object that carries weight far beyond its function. In this work, I reimagine the mailbox as a poetic structure: a container of longing, memory, and imagined correspondence. Clad in mirror, each mailbox reflects not only its surroundings but the inner landscapes of those who pass by. The mirror becomes a threshold-fragmenting and reassembling identity, place, and self.

Inside each mailbox are two sealed letters-one in English and one in Farsi. They remain unreadable unless the mailbox is destroyed. These letters hold imagined voices: fragments of memory, silence, desire, and private moments of connection. Though hidden from view, they suggest the presence of lives that have crossed borders, lost languages, or waited for messages that never came.

This series invites viewers to consider the immigrant experience not only as a physical crossing, but as an interior migration: a shifting between selves, histories, and ways of being. The mirrored mailboxes become quiet monuments to the universal human longing for recognition, communication, and home.

In transforming an ordinary object into a sacred container, The Mailbox Series poses intimate questions: What do we carry that cannot be sent? What remains unread? And what, even in silence, still asks to be heard?

Exhibition text written by Shabnam K. Ghazi