Pantea Karimi

Statement: Using both traditional methods and computer- graphics programs, I often combine silkscreen and monotype, watercolor, and computer-generated drawings within a single composition. I also create individual watercolor paintings that are visual and conceptual extensions of my mixed-media prints. My art process and content directly speak to my life experience both as an immigrant and artist; scenes in my works visualize concepts from global to local, and I include current and relevant events, while preserving a connection to the past through rendering layered imageries. My aim is to be evocative and I invite viewers to explore, and to re-think intersections, and contradictions, where events overlap and disperse at the same time.

The Logic of Human Magma series: This new body of work, 2012, focuses on recent uprisings around the world, including the street occupations by people in the USA, the Middle East, and other parts of the world. The paintings are inspired by photos that I took in Zuccotti Park in October 2011, and people's cardboard signs and occupied spaces on the streets of Manhattan. I am particularly intrigued by the image of the swarm. The media regards the crowd as undifferentiated groups of people who passively accept messages authored by common interests. But it is the individual, personal point of view that always captures my imagination. Notes written on single placards with creative messages composed by individual members of the crowd are highlighted in my paintings. While this body of work tackles a common global issue, it is also a personal narrative conjuring up the revolutionary and post-revolutionary times in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where I spent most of my childhood years.  The swarm in my work addresses a sense of nostalgia and at times even an expression of regret that can be shared by contemporary Iranians in diaspora.