Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Artist Exhibition

I attended Mahsan Ghazlanzad's exhibition for my artist exhibition. Her work focused on paper airplanes. All her work was in an abstract style and done with paint on canvas. Meaning aside, all of the pieces were very aesthetically pleasing. They utilized muted colors and lots of negative space surrounding simple forms.
Besides me wanting to hang any of her paintings on my wall at home, I noticed all of her work had much more serious undertones. Perhaps it is because of her heritage but I believe all of her works dealt with issues in the middle east or at least with American imperialism, and it's force as an international police power. I took two meanings from her pieces. Either the planes were symbols of hope, crushed and crumpled in forgotten piles, or they were symbols of the US drones that bomb without discrimination, that had corrupted the blue sky to a object of fear.
They could have both meanings, or neither and just be a more innocent and personal obsession with paper planes. I think of paper planes in art usually as a symbol of freedom or hope, but when I saw her piece where the planes created a fence, it changed how I viewed all of the other pieces.  They are critical of US militarization and involvement abroad, taking something innocent associated with hope and freedom (paper planes and the USA), then corrupting them into drones, symbols of the American war machine.
Her works were very successful visually, and if I interpreted them correctly, then also successful in getting the message across.

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