all of this year’s televised revolutions have forced the west to notice a huge part of the world we have been ignoring for years: the youth of the middle east! but sf-based artist, taravat talepasand, who grew up in a persian home, has been raising the issues of the first-generation identity crisis since the mid-2000s. her work is irreverent, risqué and more than a little political, but there’s no better way to create a conversation that we don’t want to have than by throwing it in our faces.
a graduate of risd and the sf art institute, her meticulously produced work pushes cultural limits by exploring her own personal identity and duality as an iranian-american woman in a globalized world. her female figures, which are all self-portraits, demonstrate this duality quite well: veiled, legs wide, stripped or stripping, they are all objects of desire, sometimes pornographic, sometimes modest, and always somewhat confused as to where they belong. veils and masks play a central role, layering forced and inherent identities and culture, shrouding, peeling back, or revealing. the notions of the body and sexuality also come into play here, creating complex meaning for both audiences, east and west.
her traditional technique and references to art history create another dynamic of duality between the past and the present, modernity and tradition, echoing the muddled identities of her figures. while in iran, she studied with a persian-minature painter and continues to work with the traditional colors and techniques of the renaissance, including one of the world’s oldest types of paint, egg-tempera. juxtaposing classical busts and robes with graffiti, pinocchio, a bong, and other western iconography, the imagery of two polar generations conflicts and mingles, urging us to consider our own taboos, stereotypes, and those of a distant audience. what would the clerics think?!
about this new series of paintings, she writes:
The new work has been inspired by Iranian clerics suggesting a “cultural campaign” against Iranian women and their Westoxication. My new interest in sculpture follows the words of Lynda Benglis, “What if I was my own subject and my own object, looking back at the men and the viewer in general?” This presents the effect that desire can have on an object. In the end, I am the Corrupt Minority.
there really couldn’t have been a better time for this work to be shown. there is a marked maturity and subtlety in these works that is a slight a departure from her in-your-face drawings and paintings of the past years. the crudeness has been taken down a notch, but in world where a few kids on twitter can bring down entire political systems, maybe our attention doesn’t need to be attracted in the same way? either way, i find her paintings undeniably relevant and intriguingly beautiful.
her new solo show, the corrupt minority, opens this friday, may 6 at the steven zevitas gallery in boston! congratulations, taravat!!!
images via alarm press & steven zevitas gallery.
