When Ainaz Alipour arrived at USF, she began to sew, taking up this tactile meditation in the name of comfort. When she sews, memories of her grandmother bubble up from their chamber. A desire for comfort is also an acknowledgment of discomfort, and perhaps anxiety for one begets the other. It is this that one may have as an entry point to her work, which migrates between the tactile and the virtual.
The body is central to Alipour’s work and can be seen throughout her oeuvre as performances transformed into media, textile, and installation pieces. The act of consumption—and its means—looms throughout her work. An early video installation consisted of a body pillow with three appendages meant for people to
lay on and to peer into the center where a 360-video of the artist eating the material inside can be viewed. In earlier animations, one may see a mouthless woman moving to and
fro transforming into a mouth with feet and hands coming out of her lips, hands stretching and reforming, and flowers opening and closing. Dubbed over these scenes is the artist’s voice, singing in ethereal tones. The song is indecipherable because it is reversed to become a remnant of language, initially Farsi—the artist is Iranian—that is now a soothing universal sound emanating from the depths of her being.
New computer-generated animations—which form a perfect synthesis for the artist between video and illustrative animation—depict what might be an extension of the previous work in which women-like forms undulate into and out of one another, bend oddly, have masks for faces, and feet that move or point in the wrong directions. The forms are white, black, purple, and pearlescent providing a kind of distancing, much like the song in reverse, from the real. For the artist, these works express certain relations of fantasy and terror. But pain and the imagination loom large throughout Alipour’s work. According to Elaine Scarry, “Pain and imagining are the ‘framing events’ within whose boundaries all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur; thus, between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche.” And pain is not just physical, but psychical and emotional. This framing is perhaps most evident in the digital “place” the artist is creating for all of these figures to perform in.
When presented, Alipour’s video works are often paired with physical forms reminiscent of the bodies in the animations. At times they are stuffed forms the artist calls “cushions” in pastel and earthy colors, not reminiscent of skin or viscera and so, pulled back from the tones of real bodies but not entirely. Other physical works are sewn forms that hang on walls or lie flat on the ground and still others that are figurative, one of which suggests a woman plucking another’s eyebrows. Sewing, which has a soothing effect on the artist, is multitudinous for its utilitarian and symbolic elements, the former as clothing or decoration and the latter as mythmaking (spider that sews) and stitching up (sutures). Pain and the imagination become poles between which the artist is trying to create a new language, one that embraces the body as creator and destroyer, matter and memory as well as fantasy and terror.
Artist Profile Written by Colin Edgington