The concepts of identity, immigration, and separation from one’s homeland are pervasive in Yousefian’s work. In the Pallid series, Yousefian explores how her cultural heritage has shaped her identity. In her previous series such as Letters and Memories, she examined her identity by cutting up old letters and personal photographs into fragments then rearranging them to create new forms, thereby making them illegible and unrecognizable. Through that process, she has shown how memory fails to preserve the details of the past yet maintains a totality of feelings and emotions that have been embedded into one’s being. To create the Pallid series, Yousefian took a similar approach, this time she went through books of Persian poetry and calligraphy, cut the pages into small fragments, and pasted them in a new arrangement on wooden panels. A coat of beeswax and a layer of epoxy resin poured on top of these panels further distances the viewer from these once perfect and meaningful calligraphic scripts. These elaborate scripts, which once served as the backbone of a nation’s cultural identity are now abstracted, becoming blurred shapes and lines that are at once pleasing to look at and impossible to decipher.