In this two-person exhibition and conversation between artists Azadeh Gholizadeh and Nazafarin Lotfi, both artists use landscape as a view-finder that allows for the re-drawing of maps, homes, and the bodies that inhabit them. In Gholizadeh’s needlepoint tapestries and Lotfi’s performative photographs, boundaries serve as a way to create spaces, rather than define or circumscribe. In Lotfi’s images and sculptures, the line between object/subject and human/nature is removed and hybridized, creating fragmented portals that reveal “possibilities of life within them.” In Gholizadeh’s topographical, pixelated tapestries, the “gesture of connecting two points with the yarn… is a constant negotiation within an image and between the boundaries of forms.”
The two artists have been friends for over 10 years, and shared visual motifs and overlapping conversations emerge: rock forms, shifting horizon lines, architecture, forest shadows, and the both present and absent body. For Gholizadeh who lives in Chicago, and Lotfi who lives in Arizona, the studio is a place to respond to and recall both current and past homes. It’s a complicated topic and source, one that they talk about in-depth in their recent interview of one another. “Home is perspectival” Gholizadeh notes, and neither artist is interested in a nostalgic view. Rather, they position memory as a “way of looking” and longing as a state of imagination in which remembering becomes a generative act of holding time and creating space for the future.