Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. We begin with a series of shots from an outdoor exhibition on Governors Island right now. Timely, political, educational, and powerful; “Eyes on Iran” is an excellent opportunity to contemplate the values we say that we honor and are willing to fight for. It is also an opportunity for Iranians in New York to speak up regarding the ongoing protests in their home country to clarify what the issues are.
On a cold but sunny December day, it is also gratifying to see such visual eloquence in the public space. From the description: “Amplifying the critical movement of Woman, Life, Freedom, the exhibition ‘Eyes on Iran’ seeks to hold the world’s gaze on the unfolding revolution and human rights abuses in Iran, while continuing to demand effective action. With the installation facing the United Nations, the location of the installation calls for direct accountability required from the U.N and their respective global leaders.”
Artists include Sheida Soleimani, Aphrodite Désirée Navab, Z, Icy and Sot, Shirin Neshat, Mahvash Mostala, Sepideh Mehraban, Shirin Towfiq, JR, and conceptual artist and co-founder of For Freedoms Hank Willis Thomas. We share a few of them here with you.
And following those images we give you a few others from our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Faile, Glare, Short, Bumer, Randy, and Sidk.
Shirin Neshat. A stark black and white photograph of the artist’s eye inscribed with farsi calligraphy with an excerpt from the Iranian female poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem “I Pity the Garden”.
Icy and Sot created “Bricks of Revolution” to “represent the strength of the activists who are currently risking their lives, inside and outside prisons, to fight oppression. This installation is an homage to political prisoners and all those paving the way to revolution in Iran.”
Aphrodite Desiree Navab’s installation is appropriately timed with the Winter Solstice. On this night, Shab-e-Yalda, meaning “Night of Birth” in Farsi, Iranian girls tie colorful ribbons to trees, making wishes. As an Iranian-born, NYC-based artist and activist protesting in solidarity with Iranian women, my one wish is for women to live life in freedom. The bandanas are the colors of the Iranian flag -green, white, and red. However, they do not have symbols of either theocracy or monarchy at their center, but instead have one word in Farsi: meaning woman.
Street Artist and installation artist Hot Tea is back in New York and getting ready for summer by blending his color palette into concrete rather than suspending it strand-by-strand in the air.
The Minneapolis based yarn artist very possibly has some Mexican blood because this private pool commission is strikingly washed in color that plays with the structural geometry in a way reminiscent of work by the architect Luis Barragan and his disciple Ricardo Legorreta. The Spanish conquerors were reportedly impressed with the colorfully painted buildings as well as the advanced architecture they found when they invaded the Aztec City of Tenochtitlan, now known as Mexico City and here on Roosevelt Island Hot Tea embraces jubilant color with the same passion that the two Mexican Masters did in their public and private projects.
In his large scale yarn installations the gradient fade from one color to another in three dimensional circumstances can evoke deeper emotional/psychological responses than one may expect: likely because of the gradual shifts and bending light waves and your own associations that are triggered by color. Now using paint instead of yarn, Hot Tea says that the desired effect is the same.
“This piece is inspired by my color field installations that take up both private and public spaces. I love introducing color to spaces that seem neglected or forgotten.”
Once the home of an asylum, the island is still a quasi secret getaway that just happens to lie in the plain view of Manhattan and Queens. Because of its location and its history, the artist says he has felt that the pool project has summoned both associations of a place to escape to and a place where mental states are out of balance.
“I entitled this piece “Asylum” because the act of creating it pushed my mental and physical endurance so far that I wasn’t sure I could complete the task,” he says of the challenge. Painting by himself such a large expanse in only a few days may have been more difficult than he had estimated, but he is satisfied with the otherworldly effect the result is summoning.
“When people experience my installations I hope that they will remember the experience far after the moment is gone. My goal for people who are viewing my work is to evoke subconscious feelings one may have forgotten.”
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