Love, or Something Like It

On Fourth Avenue, love is in the air.

Or rather, it's Love Talk, an exhibition on view at Zora Art Space in Gowanus through December 24. An exhibition of photographic works, Love Talk presents the works of three Iranian women artists: Mandana Fard, Minoo Azad, and Jeanette Bokhour. 

Stylistically and thematically, the works offer a range of approaches to the photographic image. All in color, each explores a relationship to perspective in distinct ways.

On the expository end of the scale, Fard's images of 16th century murals at Chehel-Satoon, a palace located in Isfahan, are straightforward presentations of the murals, as if to simply offer us a seat in front of her personal favorites. 

Azad, on the other hand, presents a more overtly subjective lens with her natural landscapes focused on patterns of ducks, lily pads on a pond reflecting a blue and rust-colored sky, or a pile of smooth stones. Moving us into abstraction are Jeanette Bokhour's studies of Monet's Garden in Giverny, France. Close-up and excerpted from the context of the whole painting, the pieces, soft ripples of color often illuminated by an unseen and mysterious light source, hold the viewer at close range with no edge nor line to guide us through the image.

Perhaps it was the cacophony of cars going by on Fourth Avenue, or the glare of ambient light coming in the front windows and obscuring my view of the framed images, but there was little feeling of love in Love Talk. Love is what we need, big juicy servings of it, especially when Iranians and Americans are talking with each other.

Accompanying Fard's images is a tender text about a visit home and snow-covered streets, and it would have been nice to see or feel that point of view in the images as well. Sentimentality hovers in the negative spaces of Azad's landscapes, bringing her viewer's  attention to relationships between animals, objects, light and shadow through her experimentations into figure and ground. Our appreciation of these architecturally poetic moments, however, is disrupted at times by an awareness of process in the digital print.

Zora Art Space has been open for six months. It is a multidisciplinary venue for performances, film, and exhibitions, complete with a cafe from which you can order a cup of tea, coffee, and other treats to warm you up or inspire conversation post exhibition.  

The founder of Zora Art Space, Zohreh Shayesteh, is an artist herself who believes in having a place where artists can experiment and connect with each other without the commercial pressures of the art market.  

Most successful in creating images to stir up love-like sensations are Bokhour's abstracted images, which achieve a haptic quality; the eye is impelled to act more like skin, brushing the surface, feeling the contours as we search for information. 

The fleshy field of color enclosed between two moon-white concave shapes in "Theatrics 2" draws the viewer into a spotlit moment deep into the picture plane, like a secret not meant for us. And in "Symphonics" the light undulates off the striations of green and pink to create an image equal parts landscape and lust. 

The confusion that Bokhour evokes, confusion of direction, of scale, of where we are and when this moment will end, certainly feels a lot like love.