Intended Audience
The Artist House artist-in-residence, Farhad Bahram will be having an open studio event to share his interdisciplinary art project 'Looking Glass' created in part during his residency at SMCM.
Bahram’s project, ‘Looking Glass’, is the outcome of several conversations with 15 Iranian individuals, living in the United States, whose identities are often assumed by others to only comprise their nationality. In this installation he attempts to portray their complexity, depth and presence by asking them to share in a series of words and images that more accurately reflects their identity.
Mirroring the rich, interdependent, and shape-shifting world we live in, our sense of self is increasing in complexity and changing throughout our lifetime. This fluid self consists of many intersecting factors such as gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental and physical differences. By ignoring this diversity, each of us are too easily reduced to a label of ‘threat’, ‘resource’ or ‘irrelevant’. This inaccurate labeling darkens the glass we see others through and ourselves in.
About Farhad Bahram
Bahram has shown nationally and internationally ranging from venues such as ArtHelix Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Gowanus Loft, Brooklyn, NY; East of West Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Mission Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA; Reed College, Portland, OR; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Umpqua Valley Arts Center, Roseburg, OR; Plâtre et Moi Gallery, Paris, France; Laatikkomo, Jyväskylä, Finland; Aaran Gallery, Tehran, Iran; Fravahr Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran; Sazmanab Center for Contemporary Art, Tehran, Iran.
Bahram's work has been reviewed and featured in Art Practical, PBS News Hour, Voice of America, The Santa Fe New Mexican, IranWire, among others. His practice and research have been supported by grants and awards from the Tokyo Foundation for International Research, Ford Alumni Center, University of Oregon and Society for Photographic Education. Born in Iran, Bahram lives in Eugene, where he works as a Career Instructor at the University of Oregon since 2015.
This event is sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History.