Taravant Talepasand
Eduardo Carrillo Prize in Painting 2007 Nominee
View Paintings by Taravant Talepasand
Artist Statement
In Iran, I was trained in the challenging discipline of Persian miniature painting. I have adapted this artistic tradition to question and explore my Eastern heritage, its boundaries, and its liberating possibilities within American culture. Reared as an American, I am interested in combining specific experiences into a narrative portraying taboos between both Eastern and Western cultures. My work
combines elements from a strict and disciplined visual canon connected to ancient literary texts with a subjective realm of self-exploration and self-representation.
Persian painting is an art form which exaggerated dichotomies of scale versus labor, precision versus gesture, and formal versus subjective. Specifically the work relates to Qajar Iran, a pre-Islamic time of cultural and artistic contributions and important popular movements. Though this art form is inherently impersonal and idealized, I have imbued it with a personal context and history, blending the Eastern focus on precision and methodology with a Western emphasis on creative, subjective
expression. Challenged by using a Western Renaissance tradition, egg tempra, and the mechanical pencil, illuminating finesse in both works. I made the decision to use multiple figures as a means of showing time; by drawing myself I am interjecting my own identity. This idea of the self-portrait challenges the association of time and place; they represent my life in the United States as well as my observations about American attitudes towards Islam.
View Paintings by Taravant Talepasand