Portrait/Landscape

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November 12–December 26, 2009

 

Opening Reception:
Thursday, November 12, 5-8 pm

 

Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to announce a major solo exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Matilda Aslizadeh.  

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In this new body of work, comprised of video installations and photographs, Aslizadeh positions the highly traditional and commercially ubiquitous genres of portrait and landscape in complex relationships to found footage of different types.  Her visual strategies range from the creation of dark photographic busts, reminiscent of witnesses concerned about concealing their identity, to the generation of narrative video through the exclusive use of found footage posted on youtube on the subject of iraq, to the ambiguous blending of archival and original footage, of still photograph and moving image, in a meditation on the history of BC. The impetus behind the work is less a critique of the processes and implications of archiving and more an act of transubstantiation that transforms (the idea of) found footage into raw materials for the construction of photographic monuments and musical micro-narratives. Lurking under the opposite poles of lush visual excess and stark minimalism is an examination of persistent hierarchies in visual language: foreground and background battle for supremacy; authorless and authored images mix and intermarry; presence and absence compete as the magical proprietors of identity and meaning.  

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Aslizadeh’s iconic video installation, Hero of Our Time (2008), was recenlty on view in Diabolique: Part 2, curated by Amanda Cachia for the Dunlop Art Gallery, along with international and Canadian artists: Jake & Dinos Chapman, Dana Claxton, Douglas Coupland, Jeremy Deller, Mario Doucette, David Garneau, William Kentridge, Fawad Khan, Wanda Koop, Emanuel Licha, Shirin Neshat, Dan Perjovschi, Nancy Spero, Althea Thauberger and others. Diabolique will tour to Galerie l’UQAM in Montreal and The Military Museums in Calgary.  

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Aslizadeh exhibits her work internationally. Her previous video piece, Office (2005), was the subject of solo exhibitions in Vancouver (Or Gallery, 2005) and Montreal (SKOL, 2005) and was screened at Golden Horse Film Festival in Taipei (2005), Viper Festival of New Media in Basel (2006) and LA Freewaves in Los Angeles (2006).