Nocturnals

 
I periodically work with the singular, low lighting found between dusk and dawn. While nighttime is very active in the natural world, human perception slows and changes. The process of taking night photographs differs from studio painting in that the nocturnals are less direct, cannot be hurried and is simultaneously an unnerving and engrossing procedure. Human is challenged in the dark.

Beneficial


While the effects of environmental climate changes are well documented and progressive, through collective human effort they can be slowed, possibly reversed. Using the immediacy of fluid paint mediums in tandem with my own photographs to interpret natural shapes and internal structures, I reference antidotes to the dangers and threats.

Baltimore Ruins, 2011-18

The Baltimore Ruins paintings are highly detailed paintings of the city's crumbling and in some cases, razed, structures.  I aspire to reflect the deep, dark, gritty nature of the city, as is reflected in its architecture. Inferences to the human psyche are enmeshed in each gash, hole, and sloppy patch.
The painitngs are not meant to be seen as criticism or praise for the city, as much as observation and exploration of where  l lived for the last 17 years. 

Renewal

Renewal: a word we often use but rarely consider. This mixed media sculpture was the culmination of the work made during an artist residency at Nes in Skagaströnd, Iceland. The fabric that was used were the scraps from a small business that produced custom-made uniforms in the region. When I arrived, they had just completed nurse uniforms, and that left me with bags of white scraps that I hand painted. The paintings were a reflection of the natural elements that are in abundance in the countryside: water, wind, and horses.

Exile and Protest from the "Freedom" series

The interest in the complexity of cultural identity, a sense of belonging to a particular place, a place in society, or a place called “home”… The childhood memories, the language and poetry of the motherland… The pull of the past and the force of the future is like a thread interwoven in the fabric of my work where, as an Iranian-American artist, I choose to advocate for human / women’s & children's rights and freedom of expression. Exile as a form of a forced human condition on displaced individuals has been misunderstood and misused in many ways, especially in contemporary settings.

Precarious Prototypes

I began this project in search of objects in The Walters Museum collection that depicted enslaved peoples. Expanding my inquiry into the museum as labor archive, Precarious Prototypes ultimately explores the mannered representations of servitude and objectification within the museum’s collection. Select objects are exhibited as well as printed, to understand and unsettle the role of the museum as master narrator. And so, the drapery both reveals and conceals, becoming an index of unstable contradictions.
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