STATEMENT OF WORK

I address displacement by delving into emotional and historical layers of public space and memory. The way social and political changes transform civic spaces is of particular interest to me. I create large-scale landscape paintings. I call them idealized landscapes borrowed from the Chinese landscape painting tradition. The visual language in my pictures grows intuitively out of my imagination and experience. I use architectural elements as an entry point. I rebuild a space by recalling the images from memory. I don't mind if the result grows distant from reality. The atmosphere I create in my paintings emerges from the world's interference and my disrupted memory of the past. I look at architecture to find our time narrative.

My multi-layered mixed media paintings create a sense of space and movement in between. Water in the form of a lake, swimming pools, or currents became the focal point in my recent works.

I was born in Tehran in a transition period from Monarchy to the Islamic Republic and theocracy. I remember how buildings and people changed gradually. I remember homes transformed into underground spaces. I remember how architectural open spaces became covered with materials, and transparent windows became matte. Growing up, the first apartment that I lived in had a communal swimming pool, which didn't come to fruition. Due to the regime change, they turned it into a garden to make it more conservative.

I noticed how social and political changes transformed the city I grew up in and shaped my urban experience and relation to architectural spaces. I have become more aware and curious about my everyday urban interactions by seeing what I noticed about my past. "A Moveable Feast" results from stories, events, scenery, and memories that Houston contains and reveals softly to a newcomer combined with my memories of Iran's road trips and city life. I am traveling between near and far lands, similarities and contrasts, and past and present in these paintings.