In Situation Critical, Iranian-American artist Taravat Talepasand’s second solo exhibition at Marx & Zavattero, the conflict of the artist’s attempt at resolution between east and west in her own self – as well as the present political situation in Iran – collide to inspire a new body of work that is highly charged and personal. On view will be a series of new egg tempera on panel paintings, graphite drawings, and a hand-painted MB5 motorcycle that represent the artist’s fresh interpretation of the still life and portrait genre.
Fusing elements from old master religious paintings, personal photos, and images appropriated from the internet, Talepasand’s new works are loaded with metaphor. Some works feature the artist masquerading in a variety of iconic poses that challenge traditional hierarchies in art and society, both in the US and in Iran. Inspired by a photograph she took in Tehran of a boy’s room, the richly filled still life Discipline features the artist, with blonde hair, posing amongst the debris found in the room: pornography, cigarettes, and a copy of the book The Crash of 79 by Paul Erdman. Flocked in gold leaf and paint, the artist emerges from the guts of the book to strike a sultry pose and gaze out at the viewer – an uncharacteristic calendar “golden girl”.
“I am very interested in giving expression to Iranian modernity and experiences –how we, as Iranians whether living abroad or under the flag of the Republic can claim our modern experiential existence while still owning our traditions,” Talepasand explains. “If the work is about anything, it's about lived experience and how to claim that experience.”
Talepasand also represents two sides of herself in the darkly sardonic painting Ayatollah Land, in which Tehran has become a nightmare on Disney street. Here she is a beheaded Pinocchio, mimicking the Deposition pose as her alter ago looms behind her in traditional eastern garb, while an American youth dances around her slain body and a creepy Chip & Dale look down at her, mouths agape. This chaos is dwarfed under an emerald green building based on an iconic architectural symbol in Tehran that stands for freedom, and has morphed into a theatrical version of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. In another painting, the artist channels noble portraits in a collaborative large-scale work with painter Terry Powers, whereby she sits regally in a chair, dripping in black oil and gazing defiantly at the viewer. Talepasand’s painstaking attention to detail is mimicked in the layering of symbolic imagery – creating a sinister yet thoroughly delicious carnival.
Talepasand will be featured in a solo exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in late 2010. In addition, she has exhibited widely in several solo and group exhibitions around the country, including recent solo shows at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, and Plane Space, New York. Group exhibitions include The Diane and Sandy Besser Collection, the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Bad Moon Rising 4, galerie sans titre, Brussels, Belgium; Sexy Time, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York; I Want You To Want Me, Marx & Zavattero; the di Rosa Preserve, Napa; and the 2003 Oregon Biennial, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, among others.
An Irene Pijoan Memorial Painting Awardee and Murphy Cadogan Scholarship recipient, Talepasand’s work is also in the permanent collection of the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Her work has been written about and reproduced in Alarm, Art in America, The, Art Papers, Artweek, Planet Magazine, SOMA Magazine, Art Ltd., Metro Pop, 7 x7 Magazine, stretcher.org, Lifescapes, The Oregonian, New American Paintings, and White Hot. She is a featured artist in the comprehensive book Different Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art, edited by Hossein Amirsadeghi. Talepasand received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. She lives and works in San Francisco.
LISTEN TO ARTIST'S PODCAST INTERVIEW: PERSIAN NEWS NETWORK:
http://www.voanews.com/MediaAssets2/persian/2010_01/TalebHassan-01Jan10.wmv
ARTIST'S STATEMENT:
After my most recent visit to Iran I became more acutely aware of the cultural mores governing what would be deemed "inappropriate", an accessible state-of-being within any culture. Growing up an Iranian within America had been arduous and awkward compounded by being a female of Muslim background. As a whole, we, as Iranians, had little consciousness of assimilation because of a constant denial of our permanence in America. Being a young woman born into the new name of the Islamic Republic of Iran involves a certain degree of uncertainty over one's identity. In Iran I found myself to be transgressive, yet within American culture being Iranian is transgressive in that American individualism and Iranian deference to tradition were irreconcilable and traveling down one of those paths meant turning your back on the other even if the defiance was temporal; this was the hidden catch of the formation of my identity. The contradictions caused my head to constantly bounce around the questions of percentages; identity which is inherently exterior and self-defined versus inward and pre-determined. Was it like a game of backgammon – sixty percent luck, forty percent skill.
For example, I am from a Muslim background, but I have a fascination with popular culture and its accessibility to modern day Iran. Still, boundaries exist. Youth in the age of media and internet growing up within the confine of strict tradtional society. The decision to engage with painting was dependent of the intent to blur boundaries between tradition and the avant-garde. I am very interested in giving expression to Iranian modernity and experiences-how we, as Iranians whether living abroad or under the flag of the Republic can claim our modern experiential existence while still owning our traditions. If the work is about anything, it's about lived experience and how to claim that experience.
Paying close attention to the cultural taboos identified by distinctly different social groups, particularly those of gender, race and socioeconomic position, my work reflects the cross-pollination, or lack thereof, in our “modern” society. Since I myself am considered a taboo in that I am a conglomerate of equal, yet irreconcilable cultural forces, my work challenges plebeian notions of acceptable behavior. This is evidenced by the self-portraiture and autobiographical echo in each of my pieces. I draw on realism and renaissance painting to bring a focus on an acceptable beauty and its relationship with art history under the guise of traditional Persian miniature painting. I am aware that I am indulging in an anachronistic practice which is labor intensive and, perhaps, limited in the scope of its impact. My interest, however, is in painting a present which is of and intrinsically linked to the past, making it easily understood by the Iranian and inductive of assumption for the western.
SHOW REVIEW FROM ART PRACTICAL:
8 / The Painting Issue
Situation Critical
Taravat Talepasand
Dec 12 - Jan 30
Marx & Zavattero
by Mary Anne Kluth
Taravat Talepasand’s exhibition, “Situation Critical,” recently on view at Marx & Zavattero, was composed of a complex body of work. The included images deploy a host of symbols through which the U.S.-born artist negotiates aspects of her identity as an Iranian, American, female artist from a Muslim background. In egg-tempera paintings, a series of graphite drawings, a pair of prints, a large collaborative oil painting, and a decorated motorcycle, she interweaves political, personal, and art histories with repeated images of herself. Rather than articulate a simplistic or didactic agenda, the results reveal ambivalence and instability.
The exhibition’s two hand-altered archival pigment prints are rich with meaning. In The Greenback #1 (2009) and The Greenback #2 (2009), published by Electric Works, Talepasand enlarges Iranian currency to over 10 by 19 inches in size. She incorporates herself and other Westernized figures into the official imagery. Using graphite to draw in the spaces left blank during the printing process, she alters the appearances of field laborers working in a pastoral scene, omitting beards and adding baseball caps, even turning one man into a long-haired woman. In the latter image, she turns a crowd of street protestors into an outlined silhouette, and draws in another long-haired woman, arm raised, wearing a long, dark robe.
Presumably, these two long-haired women are self-portraits. By visually inserting herself into the currency, the artist defies the gendered spaces of labor and political agency sanctioned by the Iranian government. But, more subtly, she writes herself into the official scenes of life in Iran; these scenes are designed to reinforce not only the sharp division of male and female life in Iran, but also the country’s larger national identity, pastoral ideals, and populist religiosity. These scenes are so familiar to anyone using this currency that they become subliminal or invisible. The stark contrast of printed ink and graphite and the delicate etched line and the scrubbed shading not only draws attention to the question of how Talepasand fits into these rhetorical scenes, but puts these scenes’ ideological messages under scrutiny.
The Censored Garden (2009) is a deceptively simple painting of a woman wearing an open chador and niqab (a long dark robe and a veil covering the face below the eyes), surrounded by decorative flowers painted on a shaped canvas, peaked like a mosque window. The woman’s torso is exposed but pixilated; her tilted, draped head, and slightly outstretched hand echo emblematic images of the Virgin Mary. The pixilation directly reiterates the effect of wearing a chador, negating the shape and details of the female body. The fact that Talepasand has painted herself like this suggests that she understands censorship comes as much from within—internalized as modesty or shame—as from religious stricture or the state.
The Censored Garden, 2009; egg tempera and gold leaf on linen; 44 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco.
The pixilation also cleverly refers to the way mainstream American media deals with so-called indecent images of women. Reality television and late night Girls Gone Wild commercials titillate with pixilation, and networks clean up instances of accidental nudity, using the unfulfilled promise of voyeurism to sell air time and DVDs, while reinforcing a Protestant code of public decorum ultimately predicated on the idea that the female body is sinful.
Using her own visual language, Talepasand displays the combined effect of both cultures’ attitudes about her own body, revealing apprehension about both options, and hinting at the hypocrisy of either culture in condemning the other. As a feminist, and also as an American, I have no direct experience or context for wearing a chador, other than the symbol of oppression it presents to a Western culture. Based on my cultural experience and the ideologies I grew up with, I find any compulsory, dark, and shroud-like garment frightening. That response drastically shapes my empathy with these self-portraits. However, Talepasand has clearly considered this possibility—that a viewer will project his or her own particular identity politics onto this work, either consciously or unconsciously, as I am doing—and she is interested in investigating this angle.
Hafez, September 9, 1978, 2009; graphite on paper; 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco.
Hafez, September 9, 1978 (2009) is a mysterious graphite drawing of two women next to a wall in front of the intricate Tomb of Iranian polymath Omar Khayyám. The woman on the right has loose, shoulder-length, dark hair, has her arms folded under her coat, and is wearing pants. She is looking directly at the viewer, and resembles most of Talepasand’s other self-portraits. The woman on the left appears older, has her hair tied back, and is wearing a dark overcoat. She seems to be wearing a thin, dark veil over her face that comes from under her hair and tucks into the collar of the coat.
The sense of light in the drawing is hazy, with the top of the building fading into the white of the paper, and delicate shadows on the ground suggesting nearby trees. Particularly mysterious is the way only one woman’s shadow shows up on the nearby wall, while the other’s illogically disappears at the corner between ground and wall; instead of reaching nearly the same height, the shadow is cut distinctly short.
The title hints at the narrative of the image, as it refers to a date that falls within the political agitation leading up to the Islamist Revolution in Iran. It is also the year before Talepasand was born. The rendering is so tender and ghostly that it brings up tantalizing questions: Who are these women? What is the occasion for their visit to this landmark? What do the strange veil and the truncated shadow mean to Talepasand? And how does this moment relate to her life?
Though her meticulous painting and drawing style suggests an earnest exploration, the images cumulate into an impression of the effort and anxiety involved in forming a necessarily unstable cultural and personal identity. Talepasand’s personal and oblique approach to the cultural tension between the United States and Iran allows for a complex and nuanced understanding of cultural identity, an understanding increasingly scarce in current popular political discussion.
“Taravat Talepasand: Drawings” will open at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on February 13, 2010. “Situation Critical” was on view at Marx & Zavattero in San Francisco until January 30, 2010.