ADVOCARTSY PRESENTS SOUL, A SOLO EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS
BY ANALOGUE PHOTOGRAPHER HADI SALEHI.
SOUL Opens to the public on Sunday, November 7th
at ADVOCARTSY’s new gallery in West Hollywood
located at 434 North La Cienega Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90048
(West Hollywood, CA — October 21st, 2021) Los Angeles based Iranian contemporary art platform ADVOCARTSY presents SOUL, a solo exhibition of analogue photography by veteran Los Angeles artist Hadi Salehi.
Exhibiting select new bodies of work for the first time and some completed during the pandemic, SOUL grapples with notions of sacrality as it pertains to the mortal experience of living. Balancing dignity and depravity, Salehi’s unpretentious treatment of his enigmatic subjects contemplates the absurd and sacred qualities of human nature. In pursuit of candor, Salehi’s SOUL invites viewers to look inward to decide the truth for themselves.
All are welcome to attend the opening reception for SOUL at ADVOCARTSY’s West Hollywood gallery space on Sunday, November 7th from 3-7 pm. Both the artist and ADVOCARTSY founder and director, Roshi Rahnama, will be present. No appointment will be necessary. Masks to be worn indoors.
Stay tuned for upcoming announcements about guided tours of the exhibition, which will be on view until December 11th.
About the Exhibition + Artist
Hadi Salehi warmly greets us with his new exhibition SOUL, including works created during the pandemic. Tapping into a deeper level of consciousness, Hadi Salehi’s analogue photography treats image making as a poetic practice. The unique mechanical and chemical processes employed by the experienced artist coalesce to form a metrical composition that transcends definition. By intimately exploring these ethereal portraits, this exhibition strives to articulate the spiritual nexus Hadi Salehi intuits as the connection amidst all life. Looking beyond mere physicality, Hadi strives to capture hearts, imbuing his compositions with an expressive essence singular to each subject. Hadi connects to souls, through his work he invites others to discover, honor, and cherish the layered spiritual presence of this existence.
In 2019, ADVOCARTSY presented Salehi’s first solo exhibition “LAYERS: The Art of Hadi Salehi’s Photography” in conjunction with the premiere of Bita Shafipour’s documentary film about Hadi’s life and work of the same name. The substantial exhibition served as a mini retrospective, presenting varied works from every stage of the artist’s expansive career. Where LAYERS celebrated the past, SOUL manifests the present and future.
Hadi Salehi’s image-making career spans over four decades. At the age of 16, the moment he saw his first ‘magic box’—a Russian Lubitel camera—he knew he had discovered his medium for storytelling. He began his craft capturing the stories of people in his hometown of Shahsavar in Northern Iran, documenting family members and the quiet and lush rural scenery by the Caspian Sea. Now a master of analogue photography, Salehi’s images capture portraits that are at once powerful and soft, creating a haunting quality that lingers in the psyche. He seeks to create a collective awareness by revealing quiet truths through his process-intensive works.
Salehi embraces “mistakes” and happy accidents in his work because it is where he finds honest beauty. Using varied methods of photographic manipulation, such as layering film emulsions or distressing the negative and the photographic print, Salehi pushes photography beyond documentation and into the realm of exploration and discovery. In his evocative portraits, he subverts the genre by using slow shutter speeds to create an image that is as much about the passage of time as it is the subject.
General Information:
Public Exhibition Dates: November 7th - December 11th
Public Opening Reception: Sunday, November 7th, 3-7 pm
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Saturday 11-5pm or by appointment.
About ADVOCARTSY:
Founded in 2015, ADVOCARTSY is a visual arts platform specializing in Iranian contemporary art. In June of 2021, ADVOCARTSY expanded gallery operations with a new exhibition space in West Hollywood.
