EXHIBITION STATEMENT
2024 Gibbs Street Resident Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi is an Iranian American artist whose creative practice is a navigation of her multifaceted experiences as an immigrant. Ilchi’s paintings provide a space where her two disparate histories come together to reflect on cultural traditions and notions of belonging.

In her recent explorations, Ilchi expands upon her previous influences of Persian art and American Abstraction by engaging with traditions of Western landscape painting and ideas of the Sublime.

For Ilchi, each painting is activated through unpredictability and chance as fluid layers of poured paint form a crucial foundation for space and image building. The layering of poured paint results in complex and unanticipated shapes, colors and surface textures that simultaneously embody conflicting dualities, such as delicacy and crudeness, depth and flatness, transparency and opacity, abstraction and representation, and beauty and repulsion. These pours are then interlaced with intricately painted patterns and imagery derived from personal and found sources, Persian painting and illuminated manuscripts, and 19th century European and American landscape paintings.

The resulting paintings merge conflicting elements into sublime landscapes that tread the fine line between equilibrium and chaos as well as between nostalgia and a sense of estrangement. They become portals to otherworldly and unsettled environments, simulating terrestrial and extraterrestrial vistas on the brink of cataclysmic rupture.

In these hybridized paintings, Ilchi examines how the confluence of the disparate metaphorical languages of abstraction, ornamentation and the Sublime can reflect the harmonies and tensions caused by the meeting of different cultures and traditions, on a personal, sociopolitical and environmental scale.