Gohar Dashti: Dissonance
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West Vancouver Art Museum 680 17 Street, West Vancouver, British Columbia V7V 3T2
Gohar Dashti, "Home #4," 2017
detail, digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Reopening plans
The West Vancouver Art Museum will be reopening to the public on Wednesday, July 8, with reduced hours. Precautions are being taken to ensure the safety of visitors and staff. Masks are encouraged, but not required. Visitors will be limited to eight at a time.
Dissonance features photographs by Iranian ar st Gohar Dash that explore notions of home and sanctuary, which are inverted and reframed. The photographs from her series, Stateless, situate human occupants and observers in wild, visually hostile landscapes. Arid deserts, rugged mountain paths and craggy crevasses become makeshift kitchens and living rooms for their dispossessed inhabitants. There is both hope and implicit fruitlessness in the efforts of Dash ’s subjects, who vacillate between determination and despair. Mirroring these images is her Home series, in which plants have overtaken domestic spaces. Staged in mostly dilapidated interiors, stripped of fixtures and furnishings, the vegetation invades and proliferates. Also featured are photographs from her most recent series, Uprooted.
Taken together, the works in this exhibition subvert the ditinction between indoor and outdoor environments. Dash ’s transposition of home and wilderness into unexpected and uncertain places evokes the fragility of daily norms during wartime and migration. The walls and ceiling may crumble without warning or home must be abandoned at a moment’s notice and, yet, life goes on. This exhibition is part of the 2020 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.
About The Artist
Gohar Dash received her M.A. in Photography from the Fine Art University of Tehran in 2005. For the last 15 years, she has concentrated on social issues, making particular references to history and culture through a convergence of interests in anthropology and sociology. Her practice continuously develops from life events and the intersections between the personal and the universal, the political and the fantasized.
Dash has participated in several art residencies and scholarships, including The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH, USA (2017); the DAAD Award, UdK Berlin, Germany (2009–2011); Visi ng Arts Bradford/London, UK (2009); and Interna onal Arts & Ar sts (Art Bridge), Washington, DC, USA (2008). Her photographs are held in private and public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, USA; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago, USA.
Guest Curator: Pantea Haghighi