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Zoe Blair-Schlagenhauf

Exhibition View + Book Signing Reception – Pouya Afshar’s “The Charm of the Unfamiliar”

By Events

SOLO EXHIBITION by POUYA AFSHAR
The Charm of the Unfamiliar 
Exhibition Viewing and Book Signing Reception
An In-Person Event

DECEMBER 11th – 2-5 pm – at Craft Contemporary Museum

5814 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Special exhibition viewing with artist Pouya Afshar of his solo exhibition, The Charm of the Unfamiliar at Craft Contemporary.

Join us to gain keen insight into Afshar’s solo exhibition and multi-media story of displacement, migration, and resiliency.

Exhibition viewing will be followed by a book signing reception of Pouya Afshar’s limited edition monograph “In Character” in the museum courtyard.

This program is made in collaboration with Farhang Foundation. Click here to RSVP!

Order your copy of “In Character” here! Email info@advocartsy to inquire about picking up your copy at the book signing reception.

Hadi Salehi: SOUL – Artist+Curator Led Exhibition Tour

By Past Exhibitions

Join us for an artist+curator led tour of Hadi Salehi’s ongoing solo exhibition of analogue photography, SOUL.

Beginning promptly at 3 pm, join us at our West Hollywood gallery.

434 N. La Cienega Blvd. (just south of Melrose)
West Hollywood, CA 90048.

For more information or to request a catalogue, email info@advocartsy.com.

Please RSVP here.
Curatorial Statement:
Hadi Salehi warmly greets us with his new exhibition SOUL, showcasing works created during the pandemic. Tapping into a deeper level of consciousness, Hadi Salehi’s analogue photography treats image making as a poetic practice. The unique mechanical and chemical processes employed by the experienced artist coalesce to form a metrical composition that transcends definition. By intimately exploring these ethereal portraits, this exhibition strives to articulate the spiritual nexus Hadi Salehi intuits as the connection amidst all life. Looking beyond mere physicality, Hadi strives to capture hearts, imbuing his compositions with an expressive essence singular to each subject. Hadi connects to souls, through his work he invites others to discover, honor, and cherish the layered spiritual presence of this existence.

Artist Biography:
Hadi Salehi is a master of the art of analog photography. Salehi’s images capture diverse portraits that are powerful and soft, leaving a haunting quality that lingers in the psyche. Salehi seeks to create a collective awareness as a cultural messenger through his images, revealing quiet truths through his process intensive works. With a career that spans more than 40 years, Salehi has closely documented cultural innovators such as Keith Haring, as well as developed an expansive body of analog, digital, film, and mixed media works. Hadi Salehi is a graduate of Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and currently resides in Los Angeles.

Hadi Salehi: SOUL – a Solo Exhibition of Analogue Photography

By Events

We are pleased to announce HADI SALEHI’s second solo exhibition with ADVOCARTSY – SOUL.

Public Opening: November 7th from 3-7pm

At ADVOCARTSY’s new West Hollywood Gallery (just south of Melrose)
434 N. La Cienega Blvd. West Hollywood, CA. 90048.

To request a catalogue, email info@advocartsy.com

For more information or to request a preview catalogue, email info@advocartsy.com.

www.advocartsy.com

Curatorial Statement:

Hadi Salehi warmly greets us with his new exhibition SOUL, showcasing works created during the pandemic. Tapping into a deeper level of consciousness, Hadi Salehi’s analogue photography treats image making as a poetic practice. The unique mechanical and chemical processes employed by the experienced artist coalesce to form a metrical composition that transcends definition. By intimately exploring these ethereal portraits, this exhibition strives to articulate the spiritual nexus Hadi Salehi intuits as the connection amidst all life. Looking beyond mere physicality, Hadi strives to capture hearts, imbuing his compositions with an expressive essence singular to each subject. Hadi connects to souls, through his work he invites others to discover, honor, and cherish the layered spiritual presence of this existence.

Artist Biography:

Hadi Salehi is a master of the art of analog photography. Salehi’s images capture diverse portraits that are powerful and soft, leaving a haunting quality that lingers in the psyche. Salehi seeks to create a collective awareness as a cultural messenger through his images, revealing quiet truths through his process intensive works. With a career that spans more than 40 years, Salehi has closely documented cultural innovators such as Keith Haring, as well as developed an expansive body of analog, digital, film, and mixed media works. Hadi Salehi is a graduate of Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and currently resides in Los Angeles.

Once Upon a Time – Summer Group Exhibition

By Events

Opening Saturday, August 28th, 2021. 11 am – 5 pm.

At ADVOCARTSY’s new West Hollywood Gallery
434 N. La Cienega Blvd. West Hollywood, CA. 90048.

To request a catalogue, email info@advocartsy.com

On View Until October 9th, 2021.

Curatorial Statement:

Myth, fantasy, and memory collide in Once Upon a Time, a group exhibition exploring the dialogue between contemporary artists of Iranian origin whose work is inspired by or acts as a reimagined form of memory or fairytale. The Persian equivalent of “Once upon a time” is “Yeki bood, yeki nabood,” literally translating to “There was one and there was not one.” Beginning stories with this tradition communicates an indefinite amount of time, space and duality. This exhibition is composed of artists working across various disciplines, the marriage of these disparate visual motifs crystallizes the concepts of myth, fantasy, and memory into an entity that feels alive. Through Once Upon a Time, we aim to traverse the common narrative body in search of a central thread woven throughout the complex tapestry of life as we understand it.

Including works by:

Pouya Afshar. Afsoon. Mohammad Barrangi. Ali Dadgar. Siavash Jaraiedi. Simin Keramati. Yassi Mazandi. Dana Nehdaran. Dariush Nehdaran. Mobina Nouri. Samira Nowparast. Hadi Salehi. Sepideh Salehi.  Shadi Yousefian.

Shadi Yousefian – TRANSFORMATION – Opening Reception

By Events

Pallid 12, 2020, Paper, Paraffin Wax, and Epoxy Resin on Wood Panel, 36 x 36 in

Public Opening Reception:
Saturday, June 19th, 4-8 pm
Sunday, June 20th, 1-5 pm

At ADVOCARTSY’s new West Hollywood Gallery
434 N. La Cienega Blvd. West Hollywood, CA. 90048.

No RSVP Required, Free and Open to the Public.
The exhibition will be on display until July 17th.

To request a preview catalogue,
email info@advocartsy.com

 

ADVOCARTSY is pleased to announce the opening of its new gallery space, located at 434 North La Cienega Blvd on the edge of the West Hollywood Design District. TRANSFORMATION, an exhibition of mixed media constructions based in photography and collage by artist Shadi Yousefian will inaugurate the new location. This is Shadi Yousefian’s second solo exhibition with ADVOCARTSY. Her first solo exhibition launched and inaugurated ADVOCARTSY’s downtown Los Angeles gallery in 2017.
This exhibition surveys a diverse array of Yousefian’s new works from ongoing series that directly confront cultural identity and the immigrant experience. Expanding upon her previous work, these never-before-exhibited pieces draw on reservoirs of personal experience to explore the fluid, often abstract concept of collective consciousness and universal identity.
All are welcome to attend the opening reception for TRANSFORMATION at ADVOCARTSY’s new West Hollywood gallery space on Saturday, June 19th from 4-8 pm and/or Sunday, June 20th from 1-5 pm. Both the artist and ADVOCARTSY founder and director, Roshi Rahnama, will be present. Limited capacity protocols will be observed. No appointment will be necessary.
Read the official press release here.

 

Artist Biography

Shadi Yousefian was born in Tehran, Iran in 1978 and moved to the United States when she was sixteen. At a time when she lacked the language skills in English to express herself, she felt drawn to art to express her longing, her vision, and her experiences. She received both her Bachelor’s (2003) and Master’s (2006) of Fine Arts in photography from San Francisco State University. Shadi’s work engages personal and social issues of contemporary life, particularly, cultural identity and the immigrant experience. As an Iranian immigrant, her work reflects and addresses issues that touch on universal themes such as loss, dislocation, alienation, and reinvention. Her training in photography has given her a unique perspective on ways to employ and explore photography as a medium within larger sculptural and installation pieces.

Shadi’s work has evolved to include mixed media in combination with photographic prints as well as incorporating other materials such as wood panels, glue, canvas, and light boxes to create larger and more sculptural pieces. In her most current work, the Letters and Memories series, her subject matter has not significantly changed, but in these new series, she has moved from a more spontaneous expressionistic approach toward a carefully planned minimalistic and repetitive approach. All of Shadi’s work to date reflects the desire to capture and distill some of the essence of her own life as an immigrant, but to also connect it to a more universal experience.

Her work suggests and builds upon a kind of fragmentation and dissolution, but also the endeavor to reinvent and reconstruct a self in a new social and cultural context. In each of the series, Shadi uses techniques that appear to destroy and distort something of the whole—cutting up letters, using only specific features of a photograph, scratching a negative, etc., she reassembles them as parts of a new image that captures both memory as passage of time, and memory as the willful looking again at something anew. This process conveys a mirroring effect of the past and present, articulating both a distortion as well as a reconstruction.

Statement from the Artist

Shadi Yousefian’s work engages personal and social issues of contemporary life, particularly, cultural identity and the immigrant experience. As an Iranian immigrant, her work reflects and addresses issues that touch on universal themes such as loss, dislocation, alienation, and reinvention.

In her early works, Shadi showcases her struggles with an identity crisis that she experienced after moving from Iran to the U.S. Her stylistic approach of her earlier photographic works such as Self-Portraits I and Self-Portraits II series clearly conveys her discomfort and uneasiness with this dislocation. In these earlier series, Shadi uses photography as a medium for self-expression rather than mere photographic representation in order to express the complexity of her feelings towards her subject matter. By cutting, scratching, applying glue, then printing from reassembled and manipulated negatives, she creates highly expressive pieces that speak to the viewer of her frustration with two identities to which she felt no clear sense of belonging.

Following her Self-Portraits series, she created the Universal and Examination series which also dealt with the issue of identity but this time on a more universal level. In these series, Shadi explores the idea that identity is not fixed, but rather much more fluid and dynamic. She took pictures of different people, of different genders, nationalities, and ages, and cut and manipulated the negatives, and reassembled them into “negative collages” which were then printed on canvas (in the case of Universal Identity series) or transparencies (in the case of Examination series). These images capture that fluidity of identity that depends on the viewer’s perspective and their ability to see beyond a single aspect of a person and their physical presentation. Perhaps, these two series served as a turning point in Shadi’s life as an artist and as a person, helping her to make peace with her double identity and move towards a more serene state of mind, which is apparent in her subsequent works, the Letters, Memories, and Diaries series.

Although her subject matter has not significantly changed, in these later series, she has moved from a more spontaneous expressionistic approach (as in her Self-Portraits I and II series) toward a carefully planned minimalistic and repetitive approach. In all of these series, she is presenting something extremely personal (such as letters, album pictures, and diaries) in a very universally comprehensible style using repetition and simple geometry. The process of destroying and repurposing something so precious serves as a therapeutic and meditative ritual which helps her stay present while reflecting on her past.

All of Shadi’s work to date reflects the desire to capture and distill some of the essence of her own life as an immigrant, but to also connect it to a more universal experience. Her work suggests and builds upon a kind of fragmentation and dissolution, but also the endeavor to reinvent and reconstruct a self in a new social and cultural context.

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