Tannaz Farsi

ARTIST BIO

Using the language and history of sculpture, installation, and conceptual art practices, Tannaz Farsi’s work highlights and re-presents objects and images that contextually start from a collective experience found in the current news or within the milieu of our cultural archive. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland; Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington; and The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH. She has been granted residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ucross Foundation, the McDowell Colony and the Santa Fe Art Institute and is the recipient of a 2016 Artist Fellowship Grant through the Oregon Art Commission. Born in Iran, Farsi lives and works in Eugene, where she is on the faculty at the University of Oregon.

ARTIST STATEMENT

In her practice, Tannaz Farsi is invested in alternative methods of remembering and recording to prolong the presence of easily erased moments that arise from politically motivated conflict. Central to the work is the notion of fragmentation, structural blindness and individual agency. She works with materials and forms that are easily recognizable, using our familiarity to tease out a common language that is at once analytical and physical and allows for a complexity of meaning to develop through arrangement, organization and form. The work is project based and her studio practice crosses a range of mediums such as sculpture, photography, drawing, printmaking, and digital media. As an artist, she is interested in the friction that is instigated within the mixing of these conventions—whether it is an aesthetic structure that informs a political commentary or an attempt to bring an irrational idea or an idea that does not have definitive form into a physical structure.