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nonad - Azad Gallery, Tehran - May 23-28

If you're in Tehran later this month, please stop by Azad Gallery to view a showing of 'nonad', created by a wonderful American artist friend of mine.

Kristen Alvanson opens 'nonad' collection May 23, 2008, 4-8 p.m.

Azad Gallery is pleased to present nonad (of nines and nomads), a solo exhibition by the Iran-based American artist Kristen Alvanson, opening Friday, May 23. In Alvanson's first Tehran exhibition, a western artist reanimates her artistic experiments with an entirely new arsenal of conceptual and material resources.

Since leaving New York, Alvanson has explored the threefold of textiles, women, and the Middle East in all its formations, anomalies, enigmas, political speculations, and aesthetic conjectures. Her new work includes nomadic fabric chador (Persian veil) sculptures, abjad-9 drawings, and an animation from her Cosmic Drapery Project.

For the exhibition, Azad Gallery is transformed into a garden of hanging folds. Nine colorful chadors are hung throughout the gallery. As viewers weave through and interact with the installation, they discover implicit sociopolitical structures of these nomadic fabric sculptures as well as their nomadic persuasions in regard to art and creativity. At 350 cm x 190 cm, each chador contains nine panels, six made of different nomadic fabrics. The rest contain black fabric, the same fabric used for traditional back chadors.

On surrounding walls, the Abjad-9 drawings suggest collective shapes vaguely reminiscent of the patterns of traditional Islamic art. Drawn in Persian ink and calligraphic pen, the drawings reveal the affect space between women in veil or chador, and the forces, folds and movements between them. These elaborately nested structures include half-elliptical shapes, the shape of a Persian veil when fully spread out. These shapes represent women in chador as seen from above.

The animation ninefold is a further visualization of these complex, subterranean relationships and spaces. Like the chadors and the Abjad-9 drawings, it is structured by the number 9, standing for the occluded relations between textiles, women, and the Middle East. In the Middle Eastern occult, nine is the number of unceasing collectivity - worlds created through the hidden bonds of spells and collective tides.

Alvanson's nomadic fabric chadors explore the interactions between black and nomadic fabrics. These include the differences and compatibilities between patterns, textures, and weight; explicit folding lines; and the distribution of sequins. The potentials inherent in each fabric emerge as islands of alliance or as folds of opposition between state and nomadic art in the Middle East.

Kristen Alvanson (born in 1969 in Minneapolis) lives and works in Shiraz, Iran. She attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and holds a degree from Sarah Lawrence College. Alvanson has exhibited in shows in both the United States and the Middle East. She will be participating in the upcoming International Roaming Biennial of Tehran. Her writing and artworks have been published in Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development, New Humanist, Frozen Tears III and will be included in an upcoming issue of Cabinet magazine.

For more information visit Alvanson's website or email Mohsen Nabizadeh of Azad Gallery. (No. 41, Salmas Sq., Golha Sq. Tehran, Iran +98 21 88008676)

Click here for a printable invitation to the opening.

Devolution

I am the fat girl standing in front of the kitchen freezer with an open gallon of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream nestled in the frozen-numb crook of one arm, a spoon in my free hand. I have no need of bowls and have long since abandoned even looking to see if there are any clean ones in the cupboard. We bought a lovely imported dinner setting but I prefer my colorful, dripping carton - mostly because it doesn't need to be washed and is the sugar junkie's equivelant of neverending Nirvana. I hunt down the little morsels of cookie dough, scoop out the thick chocolate flakes...melt them on my tongue. I briefly wish I'd just gone ahead and bought the tube of actual cookie dough - you know, the pre-bake kind. Easy access. But....oh, I couldn't possibly.

OK, so I'm not *really* all that fat...I mean, I'm pregnant for goodness sake. But let me tell you, let me admit - I'm milking it for all it's worth, and then some.

I spent the first 34 years of my life working however hard was necessary to be the thin-girl ideal in a society that punishes roundness with a vengeance and I'll be damned if I'm not going to take full advantage of these nine months. The only time in my life I'll ever be given 'permission' to gain weight. Gone zaftig; it's wonderful and freeing and I fear I may never go back...

But gluttony is not for me. Not long term at least. And 40 pounds into my pregnancy with another three months or so to go means I'm fighting an uphill battle already. My midwives comfort me by pointing out that I'm actually expected to gain more weight, considering how light I was when I got pregnant. Their assuaging of my guilty ice cream stained soul works wonders and I remind myself that this organic goodness has lots of calcium...we don't want to get all rickety now, do we?

Hamid insists daily that I'm beautiful. I have to admit, I'm finally starting to believe him. The irony of this does not escape me.