Iranian-American artists hit Seattle

You may remember a little exhibition / project called "I RAN Home (In America)" which debuted at The Fridge DC this past November. Isabella Hughes and myself curated and directed the exhibition and public programming events which accompanied it, with the generous support of The Fridge. We had a greater than anticipated reception and even had some press in The Washington Post, the Express and Washington City Paper, more than once.
We proposed the idea in Seattle to the Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA), and added two new artists: Taravat Talepasand and Arien Valizadeh, along with returning artists Eric Robert Parnes and Hadieh Shafie. The exhibition opens tonight at 6pm! If you're in Seattle, get over there!Our purpose is to be as non-political as possible with these collection of works and to portray these artists as products of conflicting identity with some really important things to say. And now, for a few images you may see in Seattle...

Taravat Talepasand, Iranian currency / blunt

Taravat will be showing a collection of these blunts made of Iranian currency (filled with tobacco, but she has used marajuana in the past). In many of her renderings of currency, she inserts her own image.

"Starbucks," Eric Robert Parnes

This same piece appeared in DC along with Parnes's other paintings of covered women entering the stores of giant Western-originating companies. Parnes's juxtaposition of these seemingly mis-matched images remind us of the impact of Western consumerism on the Middle East and the constant merging of these cultures which are happening all around us.