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Artists from the South Asian and Turkish Diaspora

 

Featuring works by:

Gul Cagin
Allan deSouza
Andaleeb Firdosy
Arzu Arda Kosar
Meena Nanji

Organized by Andaleeb Firdosy

November 6 - January 14, 2005
Opening reception event: Saturday, November 6, 6 - 8pm
1639 18th Street, Santa Monica

 

 

"A blurring of the world, a refocusing seconds, minutes, hours, days, maybe years later, with everything put together differently, in ways he doesn't understand", Allan deSouza, 2001

18th Street Arts Center in conjunction with Artwallah, presents the group art show, "Prism: Beyond the Focal Plane," curated by Andaleeb Firdosy, November 6, 2004 - January 14, 2005 at 18th Street Arts Center, 1639 18th Street, Santa Monica. The reception will be Saturday, November 6, 6-8pm. The show opens and runs simultaneously with "Some of Parts," a new sculptural installation by Hadiya Finley. Both exhibitions are funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

The second annual exhibition in the Prism series, which showcases contemporary art from South Asian and other international diasporas, "Prism: Beyond the Focal Plane" showcases five South Asian and Turkish artists in four new and recent installations and visual works that collectively express a cartography of geography, culture, language and art. From the work of Arzu Arda Kosar, who calls herself a "a student of the ways people divide land," to Meena Nanji and Andaleeb Firdosy's immersion piece where the viewer is the island in an electronic sea, "Prism" delves beyond the focal plane to suggest other lines of sight.

Arzu Arda Kosar's LA County Potted renders the balkanized enclaves of LA County in a blossoming flower bed, creating abstract maps that literally carry the seeds of socio-cultural and political harmony and conflict. Gul Cagin's Metallic Landscape is a piece that deals with our display culture in an attempt to depict the aftermath of the attraction to violence and the destruction wrought by war machines in an abstract, alternate world of paranoia. Allan deSouza's series of large-scale photos of landscape assemblages delve into the socio-geographical relationship between the land itself and the iconic image of the city, which serve as repositories and stimuli for religious belief, moral value as well as collective identity, ownership, belonging and war. Meena Nanji and Andaleeb Firdosy's Point of Origin addresses themes of migration, displacement, longing, loss and emergence of possibility. A five-monitor video installation plays footage of the ocean, a space between lands, cultures, past and future, the known and the unknown.

 

18th Street programs are supported by the James Irvine Foundation, California Community Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, National Endowmwnt for the Arts, Santa Monica City Cultural Affairs Division, L.A. County Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Foundation, J. Paul Getty Grant Program, and others.

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