CONSUMPTION : : NEGAR AHKAMI

: : : : : : : : NEGAR AHKAMI : : : : : : : :

: : : : : : : THE DISINFORMATION CONSUMER : : RECENT PAINTINGS : : : : : : :

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At once captivating and compelling in their formal and intellectual complexity, Negar Ahkami’s packed compositions bear on the viewer the absurd, disorienting force of a dream. Accordingly, one is intuitively driven to the task of interpretation; sustained by such motifs as landscape, interacting figures and recognizable edifices, Ahkami’s micro figuration first misleads one to see her paintings as a simple weave of visual metaphors with a single, coherent allegorical narrative. But wherever you turn, meaning breaks. Sweet little displaced Dorothy turns into a veiled, imposing male icon of malice, the Twin Towers morph into phallic embodiments of their 1980’s “big money” testosterone spirit and elsewhere back into the gut-wrenching memory of their burning selves, and almost automatic, ornamental doodles seem to everywhere allude to a different plot. Ahkami, a U.S.-native of Iranian descent, drags the viewer down with her as she drowns in the imagery pastiche that is her inner landscape. Her truncated metaphors leave you lost and baffled in the midst of a familiar cacophony of visual information, with no certainty to grab hold of but that of complexity.

The very Islamic, mystical, “midnight journey” flavor in Ahkami’s aesthetics is well rooted in her intentions. In her artist’s statement she traces the origins of her visual language back to Persian and Islamic traditions of manuscript illumination, where she also, in the same breath, declares her abandonment of “Persian art’s impeccable precision” in favor of a “psychological approach” – a figure of speech that hints to the unusual process involved in the production of each work: In the large works on paper Ahkami’s method consists of intuitive tracing from paths that emerge to her after she stains the sheet with a pattern of coffee rings, a pattern she leaves visible around a central area of paint – a present day variation on the usage of coffee pigment on the margins of traditional Persian manuscripts and a visual reference to her past morning routine, when she worked as an attorney full-time and had coffee at her desk, the cup often staining papers that laid around. In the canvases a similar set of random patterns is laid out using a thick layer of gesso. This technique, along with the general bold sketchiness that characterizes her hand, while indeed making the works somewhat spontaneous—allowing Ahkami, an unusually self-inquisitive and eloquent artist, to part with her cerebral instincts for a while—is not really “psychological” in that it lacks material for analysis. This material presents itself later, in the apparently irrational co-packing of cultural icons; the unexpected espousals of motifs that give rise to a hectic, idiosyncratic yet familiar universe of visual overflow and scarcity in sense. It is here that Ahkami assumes the dual role of poet and illuminator of these gigantic manuscript leaves, writing, erasing and rewriting meanings in all the verbal and visual languages in which she is fluent. The result is indeed poignant visual poetry made out of the materials of the dumbing and numbing cultural assault we are all subjected to, so mad and delightful in its bite that it gives new meaning to the newspeech adjective “Iranian-American”. —NT

All works © Negar Ahkami, 2003, all rights reserved. Photographs of works by D. James Dee, 2003.

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