“Fixed Unknowns” Exhibition
Taymour Grahne Gallery
This event has ended.
The works by Kamrooz Aram, Shirana Shahbazi, and Hannah Whitaker in Fixed Unknowns draw upon classical genres of image-making—the portrait, the landscape, the still life. Each artist introduces a syntax: a repeated grid of floral motifs lifted from a Persian carpet; an overlapping series of geometric planes; a pattern sourced from a Bauhaus textile, hand-cut on a screen. They trouble the seeming fixity of these repeating designs, and their attendant politics and histories, through near-erasures and imperfect cover-ups.
Whitaker sees the film plane as a formal system, and as a site to “foster confusion.” She places paper screens in the body of the camera, which obstruct the light and allow for various visual vocabularies to coexist. Shahbazi’s geometric compositions appear digitally rendered, but are in fact produced through multiple exposures of three-dimensional objects. With each installation, she regroups the works, playing with “how the photographs question each other, enrich each other.” Aram describes his paintings as “unstable,” as he in turn inscribes, coats over, scratches away, glosses, and smears his canvas: each “erasure always leaves its own mark.”
Media
Schedule
from July 14, 2014 to September 06, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-07-14 from 18:00 to 20:00