Dissonance

This exhibition features two bodies of work by Iranian artist, Gohar Dashti. Notions of home and sanctuary are inverted and re-framed in the work of Iranian artist Gohar Dashti. The photographs from her series, Stateless, situate human occupants and observers in wild, visually hostile landscapes: arid deserts, rugged mountain paths, and craggy crevasses become makeshift kitchens and living rooms for their dispossessed inhabitants. There is both hope and implicit fruitlessness in the efforts of Dashti’s subjects, who vacillate between determination and despair. Mirroring these images is her Home series, wherein plants have overtaken domestic spaces. Staged in mostly-dilapidated interiors stripped of fixtures and furnishings, the vegetation invades and proliferates. Does this greenery evince new beginnings and life’s endurance, or is it a marker of cataclysm and absence?