Reflection, Refraction, Diffraction (or How Come I Still Think You Are There?!), 2019.
Reflection, Refraction, Diffraction (or How Come I Still Think You Are There?!) is concerned with ideas of texture and form and the juxtaposing of materiality and memory. This piece explores the evocations of feeling and the poetry of loss through placing the audience in front of an object that offers them an ambiguous reflection of self with the added context of a historically charged textured glass. With creating such an environment for the viewer, the piece asks us to imagine/re-imagine self, re-contextualize the past, and explore our liminal and diasporic/marginal existence through the formal qualities that Reflection, Refraction, Diffraction (or How Come I Still Think You Are There?!) offers.
Helia
Pouyanfar
B.A. Art Practice, 2019
| UC Berkeley
Visual Arts
|
Growing up in Tehran, Iran, Helia Pouyanfar’s artistic research has focused on reflective objects and our physical relationship to them. Her thought process revolves around the meaning of “being and becoming,” ideas of existence and nothingness, and whether they mean the same thing. She comes to these questions through Sufi influences from her childhood and her experience of traumatic displacement. Pouyanfar has used mirrors as a mode of research to study the effect of the “in-between”: by hinder its intrinsic purpose, by somewhat covering its surface with materials that obscure its reflective ability; she both include and exclude the viewer at the same time in her works to create a space in between being and non-existence.