We are pleased to invite you to join us for a Holiday Reception, Saturday, December 18th, 4-7 pm
at our West Hollywood gallery
434 N La Cienega Blvd (Just S. of Melrose)
Kindly RSVP here.
We are pleased to invite you to join us for a Holiday Reception, Saturday, December 18th, 4-7 pm
at our West Hollywood gallery
434 N La Cienega Blvd (Just S. of Melrose)
Kindly RSVP here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
LAYERS: The Art of Hadi Salehi’s Photography is an extensive analog photography exhibition showcasing Salehi’s most prolific conceptual work of the past 15 years. From a strong body of work which spans over four decades, this long awaited solo exhibition seeks to unearth and explore the rich tapestry of Salehi’s image-making career in previously unrealized magnitude. Showing in photographic layers, the selected photographs narrate universal themes of migration, family, resilience, joy and solitude. LAYERS will open in conjunction with the premiere of a documentary of the same name based on Salehi’s work and process, directed by Bita Shafipour and executive produced by SOCIARTS in collaboration with ADVOCARTSY.
LAYERS: The Art of Hadi Salehi’s Photography is a documentary that portrays the poetic style of Hadi Salehi’s analog photography. Through a series of captivating conversations with the artist, and an exploration of his experimental process, award-winning director Bita Shafipour taps into Hadi’s layers of consciousness and maps out a visual narrative of the creativity that shapes his rich and diverse body of work. Using Hadi’s photographs and archival film footage, captured in dozens of countries and including thousands of subjects, this art film visualizes Hadi’s life as an Iranian immigrant in Los Angeles where he has been capturing stories and making images over the past four decades. Shot primarily on 16mm film, Shafipour aims to pay tribute to Hadi’s creative process and the art of analog photography through her own analog filmmaking. Produced by Bita Shafipour and Emmy-winning producer Chris Boyd in association with ADVOCARTSY.
Read the official press release here.
View the exhibition catalogue here.
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.
LAYERS: The Art of Hadi Salehi’s Photography is an extensive analog photography exhibition showcasing Salehi’s most prolific conceptual work of the past 15 years. From a strong body of work which spans over four decades, this long awaited solo exhibition seeks to unearth and explore the rich tapestry of Salehi’s image-making career in previously unrealized magnitude. Showing in photographic layers, the selected photographs narrate universal themes of migration, family, resilience, joy and solitude. LAYERS will open in conjunction with the premiere of a documentary of the same name based on Salehi’s work and process, directed by Bita Shafipour and executive produced by SOCIARTS in collaboration with ADVOCARTSY.
LAYERS: The Art of Hadi Salehi’s Photography is a documentary that portrays the poetic style of Hadi Salehi’s analog photography. Through a series of captivating conversations with the artist, and an exploration of his experimental process, award-winning director Bita Shafipour taps into Hadi’s layers of consciousness and maps out a visual narrative of the creativity that shapes his rich and diverse body of work. Using Hadi’s photographs and archival film footage, captured in dozens of countries and including thousands of subjects, this art film visualizes Hadi’s life as an Iranian immigrant in Los Angeles where he has been capturing stories and making images over the past four decades. Shot primarily on 16mm film, Shafipour aims to pay tribute to Hadi’s creative process and the art of analog photography through her own analog filmmaking. Produced by Bita Shafipour and Emmy-winning producer Chris Boyd in association with ADVOCARTSY.
Read the official press release here.
Please join ADVOCARTSY for an Open House reception on Saturday, February 16th, 2019 from 12-5 pm to celebrate the LA Art Show Season in full bloom! We will be exhibiting work by artists including, Pouya Afshar, Afsoon, Ali Dadgar, Kaveh Irani, Aida Izadpanah, Shahram Karimi, Simin Keramati, Dana Nehdaran, Dariush Nehdaran, Mobina Nouri, Ardalan Payvar, Bahar Sabzevari, Hadi Salehi, Sepideh Salehi, Rebecca Setareh, Shilla Shakoori, Shadi Yousefian, and Farnaz Zabetian. This event is free and open to the public.
ADVOCARTSY presents its fourth public initiative of a multi-artist show entitled ART BRIEF IV: IRANIAN CONTEMPORARY SAN FRANCISCO and thus expands its efforts to Northern California.
ADVOCARTSY is proud to collaborate with Moms Against Poverty (MAP) as its official community and fundraising partner for this event. This collaboration will bring about Northern California’s support of the Iranian art community as we fundraise for MAP’s important and inspiring mission. MAP is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 2008 by a group of individuals, who believe that, every child deserves a chance to thrive in this world regardless of where they are born. [www.momsagainstpoverty.org].
Ten percent (10%) of net sales during this event will be donated to MAP.
ART BRIEF IV: IRANIAN CONTEMPORARY SAN FRANCISCO explores the diverse ways artists of Iranian background in diaspora create and define ‘Iranian Contemporary Art’. The works exhibited speak to the various artistic reactions and reflections to the realities of identity formation in diaspora, the pain and joy of exile, the call of nostalgia, and the fragmentation of the self.
Advocartsy is pleased to announce the list of participating artists for ART BRIEF IV:
Pouya Afshar
Pouya Afshar is a multi-disciplinary artist and alumnus from the California Institute of Arts Character Animation department and is a graduate of University of California Los Angeles Graduate Department of Film and Television focusing in Animation and Digital Media. He has exhibited his work as an animator and visual artist throughout Los Angeles and United States at renowned locations such as Harold M. Williams Auditorium at the Getty Center, Bovard Auditorium at University of Southern California, Royce Hall at University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Santa Monica Art studios, 18th street Art Center, and numerous galleries and art fairs around the world. He is also the recipient of a Create Economy Grant in the state of Massachusetts. He is currently an assistant professor of art and Design at University of Massachusetts, Lowell. (Boston)
Afsoon
Afsoon works with her own collection of vintage images to create illustrious collages. Through a combination of techniques, Afsoon’s rich, and often playful, works reflect the merging of East and West, allowing the audience to find the familiar and foreign. Afsoon’s works have been extensively exhibited and can be found worldwide in prominent collections and museums, including the British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum and Berger/YSL Collection, among others. (London)
Samira Akbari
Samira Akbari has a bachelors degree in sculpture and MFA from Academy of Art in San Francisco University for an MFA Program. Her work often explores the experience of women and the human condition. (San Francisco)
Ali Dadgar
Ali Dadgar is an experimental artist working across performance, image, text and object based media. Dadgar holds an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley and a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts. His work explores personal and shared experiences of alienation, loss and duality often in playful and varied forms of expression. (San Francisco/Bay Area)
Taraneh Hemmami
Taraneh Hemami engages in diverse strategies including installation, object and media productions, collective and participatory projects as well as curation to explore themes of displacement, preservation, and representation. Her projects transform materials of history, archives of images and information into timelines, patterns and maps that draws connections between contradictory narratives. She received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting & Drawing from the University of Oregon, Eugene (1982) and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting (Distinction) from the California College of the Arts, Oakland, California (1991). She lives in San Francisco, and exhibits, lectures, teaches and curates internationally. (San Francisco)
Kevah Irani
Kevah Irani works in painting, collage, sculpture, and sound installation. Creating dynamic, mixed media artworks, Kevah examines the concepts of identity, diaspora, and topophilia. Imbuing objects with significance of their origins, he brings disparate things together in ways that explore how they do and do not resonate with one another. Kaveh received his Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts from Emily Carr University and his Masters Degree from California College of the Arts. (San Francisco)
Aida Izadpanah
Aida Izadpanah possesses a diverse repertoire of media and styles, having worked for many years in acrylic, oil, mixed media, watercolor, photography, and porcelain. She specializes in European styles, ethnic Persian motifs, and modern designs, as well as dynamically textured abstract works. Her large scale abstract textured-field paintings are deeply associated with the passage of time and therefore, inevitably. (New York City)
Shahram Karimi
Shahram Karimi’s paintings portray the dilemma of the contemporary bicultural Iranian who seeks his historical and personal identity by wedding his personal past with contemporary form. Each one of Karimi’s paintings relates a fragment of his memories and national history, each a piece of his personal past. Karimi exhibits his works internationally, and is a curator and art critic. (New York)
Simin Keramati
Simin Keramati is a multidisciplinary artist working with social-political themes presented through painting, drawing, video art and new media. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Tehran Art University and is the Winner of the Grand Prize from the Khaka International Biennial 2004. Her paintings often address themes of identity, diasporic experience, and social issues. (Toronto)
Dana Nehdaran
Dana Nehdaran studied painting in Iran and recently migrated to New York. Nehdaran’s portraits captivatingly capture the nostalgia and historical past, seamlessly connecting the past to contemporary culture. He uses abstraction to highlight the ways in which past and present weave together in both conflict and harmony. (New York City)
Dariush Nehdaran
Dariush Nehdaran’s photography captures intimate moments suspended in time. He aims to turn spectators into participants, drawing them into contemporary Persian culture. His photographs and video works are available both in public and private collections worldwide including the Armando Reverón Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas-Venezuela 2018, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the US 2016, and the Salsali Private Museum in Dubai-UAE 2012. (San Francisco)
Ardalan Payvar
Ardalan Payvar draws inspiration from deconstructive typography and works to incorporate elements of its composition into his abstract, calligraphic works. Fragmenting traditional and contemporary type, Ardalan finds ways to balance and fuse them together without sabotaging the integrity of either realm, combining formal studies in Graphic Design, Fine Art, Persian Calligraphy and his artistic intuition. (Berkeley)
Bahar Sabzevari
Bahar Sabzevari is an Iranian artist exploring identity through self-portraiture, narrative painting and video art. In her most recent series of self-portraits, she questions the Iranians’ tendency and obsession to praise the past. She received her MFA in painting at the New York Academy of Art in 2018 and she has been the recipient of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Residency in Beijing, China summer of 2017. (New York City)
Sepideh Salehi
Sepideh Salehi works in various mediums utilizes different processes ranging from painting, drawing to printmaking, photography, video art and animation. Her works revolve around the poetics of the veil as well as stories from her country of origin. Her work has been exhibited and showcased internationally. (Washington D.C. and New York City)
Hadi Salehi
Hadi Salehi is a master of the art of analog photography. Salehi’s images capture diverse portraits that are nostalgic, powerful and soft, leaving a haunting quality that lingers in the psyche. He seeks to create a collective awareness and be a cultural messenger through his images. His career now spans almost 40 years and has closely photographed cultural innovators like Keith Haring. He is a graduate of Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. (Los Angeles)
Rebecca Setarah
Rebecca Setareh has garnered international attention for her Sculpture work, harmoniously integrating rock and bronze. Her work examines the experience, strength of the female experience in a creative process that represents the struggle of life itself. (Los Angeles)
Shilla Shakoori
Shilla Shakoori’s diverse artistic expression springs from an exploration of the synthesis between native and adopted cultures. Shakoori’s works are strongly influenced by Iranian philosophy and myth. Her work often reflects a meditative process of cutting, sewing and incorporating language and forms. (Los Angeles)
Kamran Taherimoghadam
Kamran Taherimoghaddam is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work illustrates social and political stories. His paintings and videos have been exhibited in museums,
galleries and art fairs in Iran, Italy, France and USA. (Washington D.C. and New York City)
Taravat Talepasand
Taravat Talepasand’s interdisciplinary practices draw on realism to bring focus to an acceptable beauty, exploring its relationship with art history under the guise of traditional Persian painting.
Her interest is in painting the present, which is intrinsically linked to the past, making it easily understood by the Iranian and indicative of assumption for the Westerner. She is currently the Department Chair of Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in permanent collections of the De Young Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art, Orange County. Taravat was included in the 2018 Bay Area Now 8 at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts and the recipient of the 2010 Diebenkorn Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Shadi Yousefian
Shadi Yousefian’s mixed media work reflects and addresses issues that touch on universal themes such as loss, dislocation, alienation, and reinvention. 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. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collection of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Farnaz Zabetian
Farnaz Zabetian paints manifestations of daily life, exploring the struggles of Eastern women as they are forced to navigate social taboos and ideals since birth. Her symbolic and expressive portraits of these women depict their private thoughts and yearnings, as well as their perceived relationship with the rapidly modernizing world. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Sondouzi Art Museum of Tehran in 2008; the Saad Abad Museum of Tehran in 2009; and the Peninsula Museum of Art in Burlingame in 2017.
Avideh Zahedi
Avideh Zahedi’s sculptures translate two-dimensional drawing techniques into three-dimensional figures, working to extract information from the expressed emotion and movement of her subjects and use them to represent inward states of being. (San Francisco)
ART BRIEF IV: IRANIAN CONTEMPORARY SAN FRANCISCO
Sat. Dec. 1, 2018 6 -10pm
Sun. Dec. 2, 2018, 1- 5pm
AT SOMARTS Cultural Center
934 Brannan St. (between 8th and 9th)
San Francisco, CA 94103
ABOUT:
MAP’s mission is to nurture and educate underprivileged children to their fullest potential, so that, one day, they can contribute and lead within their own communities; thus breaking the cycle of poverty. MAP is dedicated to serving underprivileged children in Iran, the U.S and around the world. MAP has long strived to bring awareness to artists from Iran and other countries to the community while promoting its cause of serving children in need.
ADVOCARTSY is a collaborative visual arts platform with the mission elevate awareness and engagement amongst artists, collectors, and the fine art community, with focus on Iranian contemporary art.
ADVOCARTSY’s ART BRIEF series provide a concentrated opportunity to introduce artists of Iranian heritage to the Iranian community and the community at large. The first three ART BRIEF initiatives where held in Los Angeles. ADVOCARTSY is now extending its efforts to Northern California. The ART BRIEF series is designed to build community and to build bridges between communities, but also to demonstrate the breadth of expression and meaning characterizing the art of Iranian-American artists.
Media contact: Roxie Sarhangi roxie@roxiepr.com
Check out the exhibition video of
ART BRIEF IV: Iranian Contemporary San Francisco!
Check out some installation shots from ART BRIEF IV: Iranian Contemporary San Francisco!