Skateboarding just isn’t a medium that’s simply related to Persian craftsmanship. However, two overlaps have been profitable within the work of Iranian-American artist Leila Nazarian, who has been exhibiting her work at Gallery Nicholas Flamel in Paris since this week.
“Edic-like decks” discover the themes of intercultural alternate by juxtaposing skateboards with conventional Iranian craftsmanship.
“The collaboration with Leila Nazarian began just a few years in the past after we met in Tehran just a few years in the past. It’s not what we see within the information,” stated Yasi Metugalci, co-director of Gallery Nicholas Flamel.
Hessam Khalatbari, one other co-director of Galerie Nicolas Flamel, defined that the gallery needs to indicate a combination of Persian heritage in fashionable mediums like skateboarding and surfboarding. He added that every of the Nazarian works was a novel version, and that it took a number of months for every bit to be accomplished and the artist to be happy with the ultimate end result.
Nazarian was born in Santa Monica and spent most of his childhood in Palm Beach, Florida earlier than returning to Iran on the age of 11 together with his household.
It was throughout her graduate research that she took a course in “cultural diplomacy” and realized that artwork and tradition may type a diplomatic framework.
Having personally benefited in enhancing cultural understanding between her residence nation, the United States and her mother and father’ hometown of Iran, she launched into a brand new idea.
After receiving constructive suggestions from some custom-made skateboards with totally different designs from the opposite designs available on the market (display screen printed on a skateboard deck that can be utilized as an precise skateboard), she determined to show this idea into enterprise. In 2015, she based Eclectic Decks, a recent artwork and way of life model that introduces conventional artwork types to fashionable mediums.
Nazarian’s first assortment was impressed by conventional Persian tilework, together with designs from the Kajal period. For her later assortment, she requested Iranian artisans to embellish skateboards and surfboard decks made in Southern California. [Khatamkari]Persian mirror work [Ayne Kari] and Persian steel embossing [Ghalamzani]. Her assortment additionally contains in style motifs from “Flowers and Nightingale.” [Gol o Bolbol].
Nazarian make clear her work in a latest interview with Kayhan Life.
Where did you get the thought to mix two Persian and California cultures within the type of skateboarding artwork?
That concept actually reached me in a category entitled “Cultural Diplomacy” on the University of California. The idea of utilizing tradition as a strong device to bridge between folks and strengthening mutual understanding stood out as a compelling method. As an Iranian-American born in California, I’ve at all times been excited about intercultural juxtapositions that fused the 2 cultures I grew up in, and skateboarding has grow to be the right medium to discover this fusion.
Your work incorporates historic Persian crafts and traditions comparable to mirror work, katamkari and galamzani. For some motive, you make your skateboard appear to be it is a part of the unique Persian work. How did you develop this idea and was it troublesome from the beginning?
Initially, I confronted challenges attempting to create works that appeared harmonious moderately than compelled. I’m attempting to have a good time the best way these crafts had been initially made, however I’ll give them a contemporary twist that may be seen in a few of my newest works, such because the surfboards I made for my solo exhibition at Gallery Nicholas Flamel. It impressed not solely from retro surfboard patterns in California within the Nineteen Eighties, but additionally from the composition of conventional mirror work.
How are collectors, galleries and Iranian communities world wide responding to their work?
So far, I’ve obtained overwhelmingly constructive suggestions from the Iranian group, particularly inside the diaspora. Through my conceptual method, I wish to broaden my viewers’s perceptions of what craft and artwork appear to be.
Galerie Nicolas Flamel was based in 2009 by Fathali Metghalchi and Kimya Derambakhsh. Since 2013, co-directed by Hessam Khalatbari and Yassi Metghalchi, it’s fully devoted to fashionable and modern Iranian artwork, with works by each Iranian artists and well-known artists. The gallery is positioned in Paris’s Malay district, inside strolling distance of Centre Pompidou.