Opening Thursday, April 11th, 2024.
Public opening reception 7 – 9 PM.
On view through May 11th, 2024.
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Shadi Yousefian (in collaboration with Lucas Rise), Obscured By Colors-22, 2023
38 x 38 in
Exhibition Statement
In this body of work, Shadi Yousefian continues to explore the concept of memory and nostalgia, manipulating and reworking old photographs from her parents and grandparent’s family albums to reveal the intricacies of how we process the passage of time. Nostalgia comes from the Greek roots of nostos, meaning home, and algos, meaning pain. This “home pain” implies one is searching for something in the past which no longer exists, but can only be constructed through our memories. Yousefian plumbs the depths of her family’s archive of memories, yet obscures these snapshots just enough to highlight the sense of inevitable loss that occurs over generations, and a new sense of reverence for our constructed pasts.
Using various techniques and media, Yousefian manipulated old photographs of her family and relatives to amplify the sense of distance and detachment that these photographs already carry with their dull, fading colors. She partially dipped each photo in black ink to obscure part of the image. Then, for six of the pieces in the series, she pasted the original ink-dipped photos on wood panels, coated them with paraffin wax and poured epoxy resin over them. For another six pieces, she rephotographed the manipulated photos and printed them as archival inkjet prints and dipped them in trays of acrylic wash, pasted them on wood panels and finally poured epoxy resin over them. For the remaining eleven pieces, she made large laser prints of the photos and transferred them onto archival printmaking paper on a printing press.
Up to this point in the process, through obscuring, rephotographing and reprinting, Yousefian separates and detaches herself (and, as a result, the viewer) layer by layer from those distant memories. In a way, she is simulating the way in which memory loses its clarity through the passage of time. In Yousefian’s act of ruining and obscuring these photographs that have become mere memories, she highlights the residues of the past while also making it inaccessible, giving us a physical manifestation of this nostalgia, or “home pain.” This act of defacing memories past shows us the ravages of time and the equally painful limitations of the present.
As the final step in her process, Yousefian collaborated with Lucas Rise, an Argentinian artist, whose artistic style differs drastically from that of Yousefian’s, with his use of bright colors and decorative patterns.
Going through Rise’s decorative compositions, Yousefian chose fragments and elements of some of his colorful patterns and arranged them over the obscured parts of each piece, onto which Rise then painted these arrangements. These colorful and glossy patterns do not serve as decorations and in no way have a secondary function in the series. Rise’s seductive and hypnotic colorful patterns demand the viewer’s attention, keeping them anchored in the present, while the contrast of Yousefian’s faded and manipulated photographs push the viewer into the past. The colors interact directly with Yousefian’s manipulated photographs and memories to further exaggerate the contrast between the vibrant present and the fading past and to help achieve the intended sense of detachment.
Yousefian’s work aims to reclaim the past in an effort to realize an alternative future; a negotiation between past and present. Her process revolves around absence and obfuscation; in manipulating old photographs and memories, Yousefian’s work meditates on what is gained through being lost. She only allows the viewer to have fragments of the past, yearning for something whole and knowable, when in reality that doesn’t exist. We turn to nostalgia to fill in the blanks of what is left out, to create our own utopias of the past, inserting ourselves into partial memories that Yousefian has so carefully crafted for us.
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Artist Biography
Shadi Yousefian was born in Tehran, Iran in 1978 and immigrated to the
United States when she was 16. At a time when she lacked the language skills
in English to express herself, she felt drawn to art in order to express her
longing, vision, and experiences. She received both her Bachelor’s (2003) and
Master’s (2006) of Fine Arts in photography from San Francisco State
University. Yousefian’s artistic practice engages with the personal and social
issues of contemporary life, particularly cultural identity and the immigrant
experience. Her work reflects upon universal themes such as loss, dislocation,
alienation, and reinvention.
Yousefian’s oeuvre has evolved to combine the medium of photography
with various mediums such as wood panels, wax, resin, and light boxes in
order to create mixed media compositions as well as larger installation pieces.
While her subject matter does not significantly change, her work varies
stylistically from a more spontaneous, expressionistic approach apparent in
her Self-Portraits series to a carefully planned, minimalistic, and repetitive one
as in her Letters and Memories series. All of the artist’s work to date reflects
the desire to capture and distill some essence of her own life as an immigrant
and 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.
