Gohar Dashti: Photos 2017: @ Ars Libri (500 Harrison Ave)
Titled Photos 2017, this exhibition will feature three series produced by the artist this year, both in her native country of Iran and during her recent artist residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
On the occasion of this exhibition, a monograph featuring these three bodies of work will be published and available to purchase.
In these three separate but intertwining series, GOHAR DASHTI further touches on previously explored themes that have become the benchmark of her work, including nature, the looming threat and destruction of war, and the place of home.
In her series, Home, the artist creates surreal scenes of domestic landscapes. As with her previous series, Stateless and Iran, Untitled, the works in Home are meticulously choreographed, yet absent are the human performers in the aforementioned series, which in Home have been replaced with numerous species of flora. In the series, DASHTI approaches the work with the question of what remains in the aftermath of war. The overtaking of these spaces by vegetation reveals the enduring quality of nature as her answer.
In her series Still Life, DASHTI once again stages nature, but this time through traditional photographic processes of lensless photography: photograms and cyanotypes. In Still Life, the artist has gathered pine needles, twigs, leaves, and seeds - popular subjects of cyanotype sunprints, but distorts their forms by crushing and dismembering them, adding another element to the handmade process.
Through the destruction of these flawless forms of nature, the artist reveals another layer of abstraction within. Though the works are produced by traditional photographic processes, as with her Home series, the prints themselves are digitally produced at a large scale.
In contrast to DASHTI'S large scale pieces from Home and Still Life, are the small instant film pieces from her series, Alien.
Created during the artist's recent residency at New Hampshire's MacDowell Colony, DASHTI photographs the surrounding wooded areas through a sheet of glass, the flash of her camera reproduced as a small reflection in each photo. The mysterious light phenomenon serves as a beacon of the artist's presence in the photo. This presence, from behind a window of glass, evokes the artist's own feeling as an outsider in a foreign land. In contrast to her previous works, the tiny photographs in Alien force the viewer closer, and to become intimate with the works.
"I cannot say if the wall - that external wall, about which the apocalyptics like to talk - will ever overcome people. The wall, which I am thinking of, is actually a mental state, which suddenly becomes visible to the outside. Does not everyone carry a wall, consisting of prejudice, before themselves? A terrible catastrophe will descend upon progress striven humanity, which only the plants, a few animals, and the woman, who has cloistered herself from the external world, will survive. " - GOHAR DASHTI
