CONTOURS OF IMAGINATION
Azadeh Gholizadeh & Nazafarin Lotfi
4.22.2022-5.8.2022
Opening Reception | Friday, April 22: 5-8pm
Closing Reception | Friday, May 6: 6-9 pm (First Friday)
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.
Azadeh Gholizadeh (she/her) is a Chicago-based artist and educator. Born in Tehran, she received her MA in architecture from Iran University of Science and Technology and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago; Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Chicago; Espacio el Dorado of Bogota, Bogota, Colombia; among others. Gholizadeh's work has been featured in the December edition of Zwirner's Platform Initiative in 2021. In addition, Gholizadeh was the recipient of 2022 Chicago Artadia award and a finalist for the Hopper Prize in 2021.
Nazafarin Lotfi (she/her) received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and her BA from the University of Tehran in 2007. Lotfi is a multi-disciplinary artist who studies how the self and notions of identity formation are understood in relationship to architecture, landscape, space, and place. She explores humanness in relation to nonhuman bodies and places that are defined by practices of map-making and gardening. She is the recipient of the Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Art Grant, Night Bloom: Grants for Artists, CAAP Grant from the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events of the City of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Artpace, San Antonio, TX; Regards, Chicago, IL; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Elmhurst Museum of Art, Elmhurst, IL; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI; MOCA-Tucson, AZ; among others. Lotfi attended the Artpace International Artist-in-Residence program in Spring 2021. In 2015-16, she was awarded an artist residency from Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture at the University of Chicago. She is currently Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.
