Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to announce its third solo exhibition by gallery artist Gohar Dashti. 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.
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.
Information
Robert Klein Gallery
500 Harrison Ave Boston MA 02118 USA
September 08, 2017 to October 31, 2017
