CENTER FOR IRANIAN STUDIES - کانون پژوهشهای ايران شناختی

شنبه دهم اسفند ماه ١٣٨٧ خورشيدي
(بيست و هشتم فوريه ٢٠٠٩)

LEILA TAGHINIA-MILANI HELLER GALLERY
IS PLEASED TO PRESENT


NEGAR AHKAMI
PRIDE AND FALL
MARCH 4 - 28, 2009


OPENING RECEPTION
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4TH 6 TO 8PM 39 EAST 78TH STREET AT MADISON AVE, 3RD FLOOR


The immigrant home rests precariously in that space in between memories of a mythical past and the chimeric dreams of possible futures. Raised by immigrant Iranian parents in America, the artist Negar Ahkami's sensibilities have been colored by this vivid, cacophonous space in between.. Her artistic response is at once embracing and angry, celebratory and sardonically derisive, humorous and touchingly painful. Perhaps she has painted herself as that small, beleaguered woman on Bridge to Nowhere that links a melting Arabesque landscape across the road from a ghostlike reflective structure that stands in for the fallen WorldTradeCenter.Over the past decade, Ahkami has been carefully honing a style that is her own. In the late 1990s, she did a series of lipstick paintings and went on to work with coffee stains, glitter, and found objects. The years of experimentation have evolved into a style now seen in a series of paintings on view at the Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery in New York City. Drawing on colors and patterns from Islamic and Orientalist art, Ahkami layers gesso and acrylic to achieve thick, almost three dimensional surfaces for her narrative paintings. "I always thought Matisse had a way of rendering his Middle Eastern or North African subjects invisible," she explains, "and a lot of my work responds to that invisibility-either subverting or replicating it."
Ahkami was born in Baltimore and grew up in New Jersey. As a child, she regularly attended art exhibits in New York City; an autograph by Keith Haring is a treasured memento of her teenage infatuation with the New York art scene. She spent summer vacations in Iran with extended family. Those leisurely family visits came to an end with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, but it was November of that year that proved to be a major turning point in her life. "Growing up," Ahkami recalls, "it felt like Iran and the US were seamlessly connected. The hostage crisis severed that. The television kept showing degrading images." The joyous place of childhood visits had now become the fixation of American news broadcasts covering the hostage crisis. Rather than turning away from the spectacle, Ahkami determined to understand it-and ultimately to explain and subvert it through her art.

The Fall, the centerpiece of the show at the Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery, is a 5 x 4 ft quixotic landscape. Drawing on techniques and imagery from Persian manuscript art, the painting demonstrates Ahkami's gift for graphic storytelling that finds inspiration and troubling fodder in both East and West. Specifically, the painting explores the inherent tension between the pride Iranians feel towards their culture and the demonized image of them that is pervasive in the media. On the panel, streams of immigrants make the treacherous journey from a fabled Iran. "The oval in the center of the painting," Ahkami explains, "is a distant, glittery, colorful fantastical world of upheaval, meltdown, and exodus." Along the way, the immigrants pass through the landscapes of illuminated manuscripts-whose infamous hunting scenes now feature naked women rather than gazelles. Perched on their exilic baggage, they watch contemporary American society whose consumerism is embedded with an Eastern topos. The figures that populate Ahkami's satirical view of American pop culture picnic on a Persian carpet, nibble Iranian caviar and sip Shiraz wine as they read 300 and newsmagazines portraying Iranians as "the other." Ahkami subverts that unspoken but pervasive narrative that Eastern immigrants leave behind places of dark repression for an always embracing and free West. In the vivid artistic vision of Negar Ahkami, nothing is ever so black and white.

- Shiva Balaghi, Ph.D., 2009Ahkami received a BA in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 1992, and an MFA in 2006 from School of Visual Arts, NY. Her exhibitions include a solo show at LMAK Projects (Williamsburg) in 2007, a two-person show with Kyung Jeon at Miki Wick Kim Gallery, Zurich in 2008, and group shows at the Queens Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum of Art, the Longwood Gallery, Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery, Marvelli Gallery, Kravets-Wehby Gallery and Stefan Stux Gallery. She received a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellowship in 2004, and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency in 2006-2007. This is Ahkami's first solo show in Manhattan. She lives and works in New York.For additional images or information please contact Lauren Pollock at: 212-249-7695 or lauren@ltmhgallery.com.Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday 11am - 6pm.