Artist Biography
Shadi Yousefian is an artist whose 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. Her work engages personal and social issues of contemporary life, particularly cultural identity and the immigrant experience. Shadi has been the recipient of several awards including the Best of Photography Award at the 13th Annual Stillwell Show, The International Photo Awards (IPA 2004 and 2005), The Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts, and the International Photography Competition (Latitude Life). Her work has also been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.
Artist CV
Select Artworks
Shadi Yousefian
Obscured by Colors featuring Lucas Rise
The relentless passage of time leads us farther from our memories, making them abstracted, obscured, and blurred by the present. In Obscured By Colors, Yousefian carefully constructs a tableau of fragmented nostalgia using manipulated photographs from past generations. In this series, 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. The viewer never sees the full picture, as Yousefian intends to highlight what is gained through being lost, offering only glimpses into experiences once had, and how distorted they become in the present.
Fading Memories series (2017 – 2018)
In Fading Memories series, Yousefian employs the same technique as in her Self-Portraits series, creating “negative collages” by cutting bits and pieces out of different negatives from her old photo albums of friends and family and glueing them back together in new arrangements. In her previous Memories series, she uses her original album photos to part with her past memories which have been preserved in these images. In this series, she takes it one step further and uses the negatives from which those images were reproduced, thus eliminating any chance of reproducing the destroyed album photos.
Obscured By Colors-20 (In Collaboration with Lucas Rise) (2023)
Archival Inkjet Print, Resin and Oil Paint on Wood
38 x 38 in
Obscured By Colors-22 (In Collaboration with Lucas Rise) (2023)
Archival Inkjet Print, Resin and Oil Paint on Wood
38 x 38 in
Fading Memories Installation 1 1/2 (2021)
Archival Prints of 20 Individual Negative Collages
100 x 155 in
Memories series (2012 – 2014)
In her Memories series, Shadi draws from the idea that though memory is essential to our understanding of our contemporary selves, one also has to let go of aspects of the past in order to be fully present. In this series, Shadi uses photographs from old photo albums and cuts out faces of family and friends that have stuck in her mind throughout the years; she separates them from the environments and elements that have faded away. These photos are then layered with sheets of transparent paper to show the fading quality, and to suggest the passage of time. While the images and faces are visible, and recognizable, they are muted, almost to a dreamlike quality so that they show that fading too is a process for the viewer. The photos, often quite small, are placed in a small plastic bag or fabric pouch, and mounted on wood panels. The effect is to both preserve this archive of sentiments and attachments, but to also show how difficult it is to focus on and linger on one specific sentiment. Her work in this series evokes a holistic approach—the idea that represented in each memory, each face is the entire composition of a life. It is a lifetime of attachments that makes us human and whole, but we can only grasp it through a re-viewing of our memories.
The Letters series (2006 – 2017)
The Letters series originated from a process that began when Shadi started to go through her boxes of letters more than a decade ago. At the time, Shadi re-read many of the letters, and discovered how much they conveyed, not only of the news of people and events back in Iran, but also how she had processed or understood them at an earlier age. They became part of her story, her history, her memories, but the physical letters simply resided in a box under the bed as a personal archive. She began to cut up the letters, not as a destructive act, but rather in seeking their essence, and to find some meaningful association with the words penned on paper. This led her to cut them up, to find the most important, and powerful parts—as if an act of therapeutic recovery. After some time passed, she revisited the fragments of the letters, and decided to incorporate them into her art.
These original letters (uncopied and unscanned) are the correspondence between Shadi and her friends in Iran after she first emigrated to the United States. At that time, writing letters was still the most practical way to keep in touch with friends and relatives back home (there was no internet, Skype, Facebook, or texting!). Letters, lovingly written by hand, conveyed intense emotions, reflected the pain of separation, but also the joy of achievement and growth. The contemplative and slow medium of hand-written letters now appear as nostalgic objects from the past, both a historical pre-internet past, but also a personal past in another time and place. The fragments of these letters originally in Persian are cut up in such a way that they are no longer distinct or legible, but are the distillation of the feelings and sentiments from one person to another.
Letters are carefully cut by hand and mounted on wood by glue or with nails and some of the letters she received from friends are dyed in tea, coffee, wine, and soy sauce to convey the warmth of the emotions. Other letters in this series are those penned by Shadi and sent back to Iran. In these letters, Shadi uses no dye, and is simply cutting and mounting the blue handwriting on white paper to show the effect of her own emotions and moods as she adjusts to a new location and culture. By cutting these letters into fragments and rearranging them in minimal compositions, Shadi at once, destroys and preserves these valuable objects; she not only highlights their meaning as part of her life as an artist, but also wants the viewer to experience the distortions and reinventions of an immigrant archive.
The Self-Portraits I series (2002 – 2003)
The Self-Portraits series derives from a desire to communicate and express Shadi’s concerns with personal and social issues of contemporary life, particularly, the struggle to understand and articulate cultural identity. In this 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. Working directly with film negatives, she creates “negative collages” from which her final photographic prints are made; these negative collages are made by cutting, scratching, applying glue and then printing from reassembled and manipulated negatives. The emotional impetus for defacing and distorting some of the negatives convey the anger and discomfort Shadi felt at the time; this process suggests her ill-ease with two identities to which she felt no clear sense of belonging. The viewer becomes witness to her struggles to create and compose a dualistic identity that results from a crossing and clashing of cultures.
Select Exhibitions
Shadi Yousefian
Press
ArteEast | ArtistSpotlight with Shadi Yousefian | 6/24/2021
Harper’s Bazaar Arabia | Gallery Dedicated To Iranian Art Opens In Los Angeles | 12/10/2017
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | SHADI YOUSEFIAN: A RETROSPECTIVE | 10/21/2017
ARTNEWS | Shadi Yousefian at the Space by ADVOCARTSY, Los Angeles | 10/18/2017
CONTEMPORARY ART CURATOR MAGAZINE | Shadi Yousefian’s Solo Exhibition at THE SPACE
HUFFPOST | 14 Iranian Artists Explore Just How Complex Immigration And Identity Can Be | 2/2/2017
ADVOCARTSY is a contemporary art platform specializing in Iranian contemporary art.
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