Spectral Days

2013 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Variable dimension

Setareh Shahbazi

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Shahbazi’s early drawings in the series “Oh No…” are reminiscent of comic strips or children’s coloring books. Subjects are rendered graphically and set against flat solid colors. The origin of these drawings is a mix of her own collection of images and the Arab Image Foundation’s collection in Beirut, Lebanon. Shahbazi’s most recent work “Spectral Days” takes an introspective turn through a series of photomontages that are based on hundreds of roughly scanned family photographs. Creating spectral figures, Shahbazi delves into the loaded history of her family’s exile from Iran following the revolution. Like the rest of her work, which is built on the logic of free association, these images resist a literal or a linear reading while simultaneously speaking of and surpassing the context from which they were born. Shabazi’s solo presentations are often playful, her photographs of various sizes dialogue with contextual objects and architectural elements.

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Setareh Shahbazi’s projects often begin with photographs: images from collections, snapshots taken by the artist, family photos, film stills, postcards and newspaper clippings. With a playful irreverence to the sanctity of a photograph as a mirror of reality, Shahbazi drains details out of images. Using digital manipulation, she breaks down images into visual components, and seamlessly reorders what she extracts into new compositions that are at once familiar and strange. Ancient, classical and modernist structures sit side by side with depictions of birds, foliage and family members, muddling our sense of time and place and activating our imagination to suggest the possibility of infinite narrative variations. Shahbazi’s work is both a very personal universe and yet, she repeats and develops an idiosyncratic elements that becomes almost a code or an invented language.

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Colors:

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• playful.a.01
• snapshot.n.01
• exile.n.03
• nonlinear.a.01
• personal.a.01
• irreverent.a.01