August 3, 2011
Photos | Demetrius Freeman
Hediah Javanshir Ilchi, “Ordinarily waiting, wishing, yearning”
2011, acrylic and hand-painted collage on Mylar
Anthony Bannon | Guest Reviewer
A trace: The poetics of a line which leads toward discovery, a mark of meaning.
In this case, in the Strohl Art Center, the trace engages two parties along a line of aesthetic discovery growing between Iran and the United States.
“Bilateral Trace: Four Emerging Artists from Iran” is a modest exhibition of 12 works in several media organized by Don Kimes, artistic director of Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution, with Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, recently graduated from Kimes’ Masters of Fine Arts program at American University.
Two of the artists selected, natives of Iran, now live in the U.S.; two continue to live in Iran. Their work takes four positions, but running throughout the exhibition are the bilaterals of public/private, East/West, tradition/contemporary, home/exile, connection/disconnection. As works by young women — all under 40, the curators said — the notion of finding a place in the worlds of social and cultural practice — the worlds of ideas and of art — is a poignant subtext that may evidence the natural hybridization that occurs when cultures mix and change.
Leila Pourkhani’s is the most traditional work in the exhibition — utilizing the classic Persian miniature form of a cyclical floral pattern, Shamseh. She uses gold leaf mixed with gum Arabic applied to a handmade paper with gouache and a grey-blue watercolor. The miniatures are gem studies, sufficient to themselves, without much reference beyond their frames, except to other Shamseh patterns.
The closest the work comes to representation is through a shared symmetry with flowers. These miniatures were the backbone of mid-20th-century art, profoundly influencing a generation of abstract painters, notably such as Ad Reinhardt, whose book Art As Art pays respect to the form.
Roshanak Tehrani manages a graphic atelier, Nirvana Design Group. Her work creates a performance event for the camera. The artist invites men and women to her studio for a meal in trade for allowing her to depict them eating. She then combines in diptych format the images of a man or a woman eating his or her meal with a morsel of food shown in the accompanying panel. She selects the two images to draw sexual inference out of the process — the sensuality of sex and gluttony. This is not exactly the work of a repressed woman, though likely beyond the ken of censors.
Sepideh Salehi, now living and working in Brooklyn, N.Y., is moved through her memory of the veil to make drawings with ink and pencil that suggest both a separation from and conduit for meaning. Carrying a powerful symbolism, the drawings, whose titles summon memories, are layered in grays, whites and earth-toned ochre. Significantly, they also hold references to calligraphic symbols. The presence of the Persian word as an element of sophisticated design within the centuries-old context of national heroic poetry is a charged element in this work. Salehi also is sensitive to a contemporary trope of showing traces of her process in the drawings — for instance, the effect of too much water upon ink or the look of an unfinished graphite application. It is smart and touching art, a rare gift.
Finally, Ilchi, the curator, includes two of her own acrylic paintings. Rendered on mylar, she piles up imagistic layers of abstract splatter technique, grid development and representations of figures and odd vehicles for both pleasure and military action. These are complex ideas that span a range of purposes, as well as a range of social and political practice. Ambiguous layers of meaning take on contradictory notions of abstraction and narrative within the same frame. A military vessel is attacked; a fighter plane decorated in traditional design threatens from above, while young women are “waiting, wishing and yearning,” according to the title. The paintings are loaded with artful energy, and it isn’t only about depiction. Ilchi layers strategies for making meanings with art and notably centers her efforts upon the bright colors, rich textures and complex patterns of traditional miniature painting.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the take-aways from this little show — the energy of discovery; the traces made bilaterally — also propose the variety of meanings possible through an art that engages cultures with an integrity of purpose.
Anthony Bannon is the Ron and Donna Fielding Director at George Eastman House, the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y.
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