ADVOCARTSY PRESENTS “DISORIENTAL” A SOLO EXHIBITION OF MULTIMEDIA WORKS BY OAKLAND BASED ARTIST ALI DADGAR.
DISORIENTAL opens to the public Saturday, April 2nd, 2022
at ADVOCARTSY’s recently launched West Hollywood gallery,
located at 434 North La Cienega Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90048
(West Hollywood, CA —March 16th, 2022) Los Angeles-based Iranian contemporary art platform ADVOCARTSY presents DISORIENTAL, a solo exhibition by Oakland based artist and textile designer Ali Dadgar. Drawing from a decades long fine art practice, DISORIENTAL explores universal themes of censorship, colonization, ‘otherness’, and identity filtered through the artist’s own Iranian and American experiences. DISORIENTAL is Ali Dadgar’s first solo exhibition with ADVOCARTSY and surveys a mad menagerie of complex, enigmatic works from several of Dadgar’s ongoing, multimedia series in an effort to navigate the artist’s darkly chaotic, yet distinctly authentic philosophical musings. By layering historical symbols, handwritten notes, photographs, self-portraits, and found materials from rugs to maps, Dadgar’s art maintains an undercurrent of dark humor that strives to recontextualize the unexpected. These elements are manipulated either digitally or manually, through painting or drawing, and form a new visual language - one of redaction, remapping, and erasure. Through autobiography and self-deprecation, Dadgar summons figures of otherness in a place filled with tradition, history, humor, and paradox.
All are welcome to attend the opening reception for DISORIENTAL at ADVOCARTSY’s West Hollywood gallery space on Saturday, April 2nd, 2022, from 4 - 7 pm. Both the artist and ADVOCARTSY founder and director, Roshi Rahnama, will be present. There will be a closing reception and artist talk on Saturday, April 23rd from 2 - 5 pm. Stay tuned for additional announcements.
About the Exhibition + the Artist
Born in 1960s Iran, Ali Dadgar immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1970s. He went on to receive his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, in 1989 followed by an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. He was a lecturer in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California Berkeley between 2006 and 2009 and is the recipient of multiple awards, including the UC Berkeley Outstanding GSI Award in 2007. His work has been placed in prominent private and public collections, including the University of California Berkeley Morrison Library.
Working across multiple mediums and series simultaneously, Dadgar’s ideas take shape through performance and 2-dimensional mixed media art. He is deeply familiar with the conventions of printmaking and formal Western approaches to art, which he absorbs and upturns through his practice. Indicative of Dadgar’s prior experiences in theater and set design, there is always a performative element in his densely layered narratives – performance of identity troubles as well as cultural contradictions and conflict.
Dadgar often positions text as a key visual component yet he ushers it into a new dimension. If print culture represents the accumulated knowledge of a civilized society, Dadgar contends that its alteration might conjure up new meaning, binding literacy and illiteracy, knowledge and ignorance, artistic freedom and censorship. He overturns traditional narrative structures and opens up questions rather than prescribing answers. Equating destruction with creation, the erasure and reformation of detail from iconic imagery in order to unsettle the viewer’s acceptance of reality is central to Dadgar’s visual language. Through a highly personal pastiche, Dadgar summons figures of otherness in a place filled with tradition, history, humor, and paradox in order to communicate his interpretation of orientalism, which he regards at best as an exaggeration of difference and at worst as a powerful political instrument of domination.
His solo exhibition DISORIENTAL reclaims orientalist stereotypes and repurposes clichés to expose the dark humor Dadgar has unearthed from centuries of academic discourse. As he layers symbols from Western and Persian histories, handwritten notes, photographs, his self–portrait, and found materials from rugs to maps, Dadgar challenges traditional understandings of art. Through dynamic digital and manual manipulation of found materials, the written word, and his own unique figurative style, Dadgar forms a new visual language – one of redaction, remapping, and erasure – to describe the disorienting experience of life in a modern world wrought with contradictory beliefs. Deeply personal yet widely universal, Disoriental contends with the crumbling infrastructure found only at the end of an empire and asks us to imagine what could come to be.
General Information:
Public Exhibition Dates: April 2nd, 2022 - April 23rd, 2022Public Opening: Saturday, April 2nd, 2022 , 4 - 7 pmClosing Reception + Artist Talk: Saturday, April 23rd, 2022, 2 - 5 pmGallery hours: Wednesday - Saturday 11-5 pm or by appointment.For more information or to request a preview catalogue, email [email protected].
About ADVOCARTSY:
Launched in 2015, ADVOCARTSY is a leading contemporary art platform specializing in Iranian contemporary art. In 2021, ADVOCARTSY expanded its exhibition space to West Hollywood. Founded by lawyer-turned-art advocate Roshi Rahnama, ADVOCARTSY acts as an incubator for emerging and established Iranian artists based in Los Angeles as well as the larger diaspora. ADVOCARTSY aims to transcend borders and connect Iranian artists to LA's network of arts organizations, museums, foundations, and collectors.
