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Portrait of Hero 1
mixed media on wood
24"x24"
2004 |
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Portrait of Hero 2
mixed media on wood
24"x24"
2004 |
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Self Portrait
mixed media on wood
24"x24"
2004 |
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Artist's Statement
It can’t speak. It speaks with an accent. It speaks nonsense.
It commands. It speaks something else. It speaks of something else.
The beak is beastlike, uncomfortable and awkward but it is also magnificent,
commanding and regal. It is dramatic but also clumsy.
Contradictions. These portraits are about contradictions.
Heroes, villains, and killers. Fascists, victims and fools.
I bring the theatrical to these portraits because the dramatic
insists on urgency. At the same time, I depict a certain flatness
of emotion that is available in the medium of painting. This
combination of the dramatic and the flat allows me to explore a
range of sentiments and esthetics through the experience of
contradictions.
Repetition. The word stereotype originally referred to the method of
reproducing a printing plate by fixing an image. We could say that
cultural stereotypes are fundamentally visual and that they become
fixed in their repetition. Stereotypes, icons and relics of popular
culture circulate in a transnational economy of images. They leave
impressions, imposing patterns and associations that are recognized
and repeated. They also come together in unpredictable ways and explode
their contexts. This is the work of my paintings.
In these portraits, I repeat forms and images in a play of contradictions.
Combining silk screening and painting enables me to repeat images and
iconographies in new ways, to create my desired range of imagery and to
open up possibilities for more questions. I draw from a culturally mixed
archive of visual material, from icons of popular culture, historical and
found photographs to Iranian miniature paintings. These portraits are
abstractions of my own feelings, questions and struggles about what it
means to be an Iranian man and artist living and working in the U.S.
at this moment. |
About the Artist
Visual and performance artist Ali Dadgar was born in
Tehran, Iran in 1962 and immigrated to the U.S in 1978. He
studied painting, drawing and printmaking at the
California College of Arts in Oakland, California. A
member of the Berkeley based Iranian theatre company
Darvag since 1988, Dadgar also collaborates with numerous
performance artists in the Bay Area, most recently with a
group of Chicano and Iranian artists in the Chicaranians
project of ethnic drag performances. His visual works have been widely
exhibited, both locally and nationally. He is currently
working on Effacements, a series of mixed media
portraits which explores the remarkable power of the human
face to awaken our passions, from summoning enchantment
and wonder to soliciting anxiety and terror. Funded in part by the
City of Oakland Cultural Funding Program, Effacements'
first exhibition will open at the Joyce Gordon Gallery in
Oakland in April 2005. |
