artist statement
My work is a hybridization of artistic mediums. My art combines fabric with photography, wood with metal, hair with clay, and other mixtures of materials. These combinations confront a postmodern reality of the reconstructed. I create hybrid forms in veiled photographs of myself, hair that is used in a sculpture of a humanoid figure, or the recreation of Islamic religious iconography. The juxtaposition of these different mediums, the textures and fabrics, releases each medium’s critical form. By creating tensions and criticality between media, I can more freely expose the political in dialogue with the aesthetic.
The principles of my work are a culmination and exploration of my Iranian-American childhood roots and foundations through imagery. Included in my portfolio are a series of veiled and masked photographs of myself imposed onto abstract or blurred backgrounds, nailed to wood. Sometimes, a lock of hair is added as a token to the Islamic tradition of hijab. The photographic image, wood and nail, and hair work in tandem to create an aesthetic testimony to the hidden Islamic woman.
Similarly, I create tapestries from nude photographic images of myself that I sew onto traditional Persian fabric. The images become distorted recreations of myself that represent masochism in the psychic development of a woman in a patriarchal society. Further, the nudity of the skin, punctured by thread, reflects a separation from the body of the maternal mother, the mother that is Iran and the mother that raised me. Finally, the rough stitching creates a painful union between the photographic image and the fabric. While there is an aesthetic contrast between the images and the Persian fabric, the images of tortured women retell the Persian narrative with subaltern feminist stories and female bodies.
More recently, I have begun to explore Islamic religious iconography by creating dolls fashioned from clay, fabric, and other materials. The dolls are aesthetically designed in sinister forms to disturb and provoke an emotional response. They utilize familiar Islamic images of draped fabric and covered heads, but make these uncanny through threatening postures and the assignation of religious titles to the dolls, which is a taboo under Islam. The dolls are a subversive exploration of Religion.
My recent exploration of the family has led to the creation of humanoid half figures made of clay, dressed with human hair and paint. Often, the sculptures are arranged in pairs or groups, exploring the dynamic of the familial relationship through the grotesque sublime. The half figures, with missing limbs or craniums, are realized in the abstract and create a pensive sensation through a static appearance.