PRESENTATION: Shadi Yousefian-Obscured by Colors

Shadi Yousefian’s work engages personal and social issues of contemporary life, particularly, cultural identity and the immigrant experience. As an Iranian immigrant, her work reflects and addresses issues that touch on universal themes such as loss, dislocation, alienation, and reinvention.  All of Yousefian’s work to date reflects the desire to capture and distill some of the essence of her own life as an immigrant, but to also connect it to a more universal experience. Her work suggests and builds upon a kind of fragmentation and dissolution, but also the endeavor to reinvent and reconstruct a self in a new social and cultural context.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Advocartsy Gallery Archive

In each of her series, Yousefian uses techniques that appear to destroy and distort something of the whole; cutting up letters, using only specific features of a photograph, scratching a negative, etc., and reassembles them as parts of a new image that captures both memory as passage of time, and memory as the willful looking again at something anew. This process conveys a mirroring effect of the past and present, articulating both a distortion as well as a reconstruction. In her body of work, “Obscured by Colors”, Shadi Yousefian continues to explore the concept of memory and nostalgia, manipulating and reworking old photographs from her parents and grandparent’s family albums to reveal the intricacies of how we process the passage of time. Nostalgia comes from the Greek roots of nostos, meaning home, and algos, meaning pain. This “home pain” implies one is searching for something in the past which no longer exists, but can only be constructed through our memories. Yousefian plumbs the depths of her family’s archive of memories, yet obscures these snapshots just enough to highlight the sense of inevitable loss that occurs over generations, and a new sense of reverence for our constructed pasts. Using various techniques and media, Yousefian manipulated old photographs of her family and relatives to amplify the sense of distance and detachment that these photographs already carry with their dull, fading colors. She partially dipped each photo in black ink to obscure part of the image. Then, for six of the pieces in the series, she pasted the original ink-dipped photos on wood panels, coated them with paraffin wax and poured epoxy resin over them. For another six pieces, she rephotographed the manipulated photos and printed them as archival inkjet prints and dipped them in trays of acrylic wash, pasted them on wood panels and finally poured epoxy resin over them. For the remaining eleven pieces, she made large laser prints of the photos and transferred them onto archival printmaking paper on a printing press.  Up to this point in the process, through obscuring, rephotographing and reprinting, Yousefian separates and detaches herself (and, as a result, the viewer) layer by layer from those distant memories. In a way, she is simulating the way in which memory loses its clarity through the passage of time. In Yousefian’s act of ruining and obscuring these photographs that have become mere memories, she highlights the residues of the past while also making it inaccessible, giving us a physical manifestation of this nostalgia, or “home pain.” This act of defacing memories past shows us the ravages of time and the equally painful limitations of the present. As the final step in her process, Yousefian collaborated with Lucas Rise, an Argentinian artist, whose artistic style differs drastically from that of Yousefian’s, with his use of bright and dynamic patterns. Going through Rise’s decorative compositions, Yousefian chose fragments and elements of some of his colorful patterns and arranged them over the obscured parts of each piece, onto which Rise then painted these arrangements. These colorful and glossy patterns do not serve as decorations and in no way have a secondary function in the series. Rise’s seductive and hypnotic colorful patterns demand the viewer’s attention, keeping them anchored in the present, while the contrast of Yousefian’s faded and manipulated photographs push the viewer into the past. The colors interact directly with Yousefian’s manipulated photographs and memories to further exaggerate the contrast between the vibrant present and the fading past and to help achieve the intended sense of detachment. Yousefian’s work aims to reclaim the past in an effort to realize an alternative future; a negotiation between past and present. Her process revolves around absence and obfuscation; in manipulating old photographs and memories, Yousefian’s work meditates on what is gained through being lost. She only allows the viewer to have fragments of the past, yearning for something whole and knowable, when in reality that doesn’t exist. We turn to nostalgia to fill in the blanks of what is left out, to create our own utopias of the past, inserting ourselves into partial memories that Yousefian has so carefully crafted for us.

Photo: Shadi Yousefian (in collaboration with Lucas Rise), Obscured by Colors 23, 2024, Archival Inkjet Print, Resin and Oil Paint on Wood 38 in x 38 in, © Shadi Yousefian, Courtesy the artist and Advocartsy Gallery

Info: Advocartsy Gallery, 434 N La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 11/4-11/5/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-15:00, https://advocartsy.com/