Shadi Yousefian

Iranian, born 1978

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Medium: Works on paper, Sculpture, Paper, Paraffin Wax, and Epoxy Resin on Wood Panel
Size: 38 x 38 in. (96.5 x 96.5 cm.)

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Los Angeles / West Hollywood

Movement: Contemporary Art
Exhibitions: 06/19/2021–07/17/2021 TRANSFORMATION
Literature: In her previous series such as Letters and Memories series, Shadi has examined her identity by cutting up her old letters and album photos into fragments and rearranging them in new forms, making them unreadable and unrecognizable. Through that process, she conveyed how memory fails to preserve the details of the past, yet maintains a totality of feelings and emotions that are embedded into ones being. In Subsistence series, Shadi is exploring a part of her identity that is shaped by her cultural heritage. To create the works in this series, she takes a similar approach to her Letters and Memories series, but this time using books of Persian poetry and calligraphy, which signify absolute perfection and wisdom in Persian culture. Going through these precious books page by page, she cuts each page into small fragments and pastes them in new abstract arrangements on wooden panels finishing it with a coat of beeswax or paraffin and then a layer of epoxy resin. These elaborate scripts which once served as the backbone of a nation’s cultural identity and still act as a vehicle for its survival, are now stripped of their original meaning and taken out of their original aesthetic context and are presented as abstracted fragments within Shadi’s modern minimalistic compositions.