October 14 – November 12, 2022
PARVIN PEIVANDI
Untold
Artist Talk: Saturday October 22nd at 11am (part of the Art Crawl)
Parvin Peivandi’s work deals with the invisible aspects of perceiving and receiving things. She is interested in the untold narrations, in the dichotomy between absence and presence, public and private, old and new. Untold is an exhibition and attempt to address the overlooked objects, individuals and facts to suggest thinking beyond the borders of bodies and politics.
Peivandi makes art across disciplines that include sculpture, ceramics, painting, drawing, video, performance, and installations. With her deep commitment to understanding the cultural codes embedded within materials, she has initiated a project with worn-out Kurdish rugs of Iran. Since 2013, she has brought 38 rugs from Iran to North America to reflect on the issue of displacement, new identity and challenges of orienting bodies in new space and time. By repairing, sewing, embroidering, and fusing the worn-out rugs to steel structures, Peivandi makes new meanings and forms in her hybrid sculptures. She combines the rugs specifically with steel, a material that she did not have access to in the male dominated metal shops of Iran. In her recent art, Peivandi finds analogy between the human body and architectural sites. Each has public exteriority and complex, shifting interiors, and this duality underscores her use of dynamic forms and diverse materials.
Parvin Peivandi is an Iranian/Canadian artist who was born in Iran and immigrated to Canada in 2009. She studied contemporary art at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. Inspired by Iranian literature and Western cultural theories, Peivandi makes art in an interdisciplinary manner in the liminal space of Iranian folk arts and Western modernism. In her oeuvre, she shows interest in expressive culture, hybrid identity, and narrative structures by using a wide range of techniques and materials such as tar, engine oil, beeswax, steel, worn-out rugs, and left-over consumer objects.