Shahroud Ghahani

Central to the series: The majesty of the rainbow will wash away this lusterless melancholy, is the female. She is seen behind a mask; surrounded by domestic objects; she is decorated and bejeweled, amputated, wounded; she appears in hybrid forms. Her own form is towering and complex, illustrating the enormity of her accumulated histories.

The themes in this body of work are female representation and oppression, traditions, power and powerlessness, beauty and the grotesque, and war. Within these themes the female bodies will also incorporate metaphysical subjects -interweaving dreamscapes, imaginary spaces and displaced objects throughout them.

The medium of collage has afforded her to work on eclectic ideas. The images in the series of artworks are satirical and absurdist. The dislocation of meaning is intrinsic to the collage and is reflected in her rough treatment of the cut outs. This is a subversive approach to the neatness of line, traditionally valued in the medium. She splices images from fashion magazines, mail outs, documentary magazines, Persian art and photographs, and combines them with her hand drawn ink and watercolor glowing pigments.The contrast sometimes is accentuated further by black and white images or happy accidents where she incorporates elements from her surroundings, such as sheep’s wool from a matt in the room she worked in, or gilded paper from upholstery samples. Mostly, the artworks have been informed by playful experimentation and the expression of the subconscious.

There has been no rigid structure in her process, consequently the artworks present an unencumbered dialogue with herself – what has arisen are symbols and objects from self-reflections, similar to ideas of Surrealist automatism (sometimes controlled, sometimes left to chance). Moreover, the series of work is influenced by elements of the Dada and Surrealist movements, particularly in the practice of taking images from the real world and distorting them to make new meanings. Consequently, through the power of images, challenging the viewer to accept something that it may not be possible otherwise.