‘Re-rooted / Re-routed’
Oil Pastel on Paper, 2020
My recent work includes several drawing series on paper. These are usually abstract works, or abstractions from representational images, in mixed media on various substrates. They elicit from my urge to draw out energies and, sometimes, excruciating anxieties, that I live with every day. At times, the work is based on images from sites (e.g. dilapidated historic houses straddling the zone between potential razing or renewal) that I “abstract” on the canvas. The viewer gets the essence of the space and place. However, most of these drawings are not planned; they happen on paper without overt control and allow room for an intuitive, automatic process.
The anxiousness that accompanies me into the studio and subsequently onto paper derives from a severely unsettled reaction and feeling toward stillness, linearity, and seemingly certain and stable spaces. Though, I yearn exactly for those things, as an immigrant and one who has moved around the US and been re-rooted and rerouted repeatedly, that sense of stability is alien and uncomfortable. The very act of sitting inside four white walls for hours and working on flat, archival surfaces disrupts even my tendencies towards ephemeral, non-archival, sometimes post-studio art making. I experience anxiety from the stillness, stillness that mimics stability, and attempt to channel that unrest onto paper. That unrest is arguably the quest for resolving a frenetic, unanchored life and placing it in a neat box. Yet, what spills out into the white box and onto the paper not only reveals the discomfort at being in an established, accepted, foundational art making space, it also underscores my inherent inability to accept such a structure in the first place.
This conundrum with the white box often expresses itself in abstract language in my work-- the very language that, while stating something deliberately, also resists direct representational signs. The concepts and feelings the abstractions speak of are so complex, that traditional representational means for them would not suffice. Incidentally, colors, forms, and textures of thin to thick oil and non-oil material on paper are often the materials I use in order to discuss this complexity.
Shiva Aliabadi’s
conceptual and abstract 2D and 3D work has most recently been exhibited at Durden and Ray (Los Angeles, CA), Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, Alberta, Canada), Wassaic Project (New York), MiM Gallery (Los Angeles), SoLA Gallery (Los Angeles), Peripheral Vision Press (New York), Kunstraum-Dreieich Gallery (Dreieich, Germany), Bruno David Gallery (St. Louis, MO), Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH, in CA), Torrance Art Museum for Doppelgänger (2016) and Another Thing Coming (2014), the Yokohama Triennial in Japan, and at the Institute of Jamais Vu (London, England). She has shown with LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division). Her books include: Shiva Aliabadi, Abshar: Cascade (Fine Art Complex, Tempe, AZ, 2020) and Now, more than ever (Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY, 2020). Her work is included in New American Paintings, issues #115 and #117, and Christopher Knight’s L.A Times article, “Object Lessons at Torrance Art Museum’s ‘Another Thing Coming’.” Writer Kristen Osborne-Bartucca interviewed Aliabadi on Contemporary Art Podcast. Aliabadi maintains her own blog called “pulsstream” where she interviews artists.