The Third Line’s Mindscapes of extraordinary beings

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

The Third Line gallery, Dubai, is presenting Mindscapes (June 5 – 24), a solo exhibition of Laleh Khorramian’s works for the second iteration of In Touch. Traversing the landscapes of her mind’s creation and offering an escape from the boundaries of familiar time and space, the exhibition demonstrates Khorramian’s unfaltering intrigue in alternate domains and the extraordinary beings that inhabit them. In Khorramian’s Guardian Pink, 2016, she grants the viewer an audience with alien deities and invites them to briefly experience the extraterrestrial terrain of her imagination. Using a multitude of technical skills and techniques to create her aesthetically rich abstract works, she creates her monotype prints by painting directly on glass and then pressing paper onto the wet surface.

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The unpredictable results of these processes serve as a celebration of chance, accidental detail and the mark of a human trace. The artist strives to decipher the unseen and unseeable as she weaves her visual lore.

Throughout her practice, Khorramian explores the various emotional aspects of consciousness as she gives form to the stories she remembers, experiences or dreams of. Her deliberately obscure works epitomise her continued interest in delirium, mirage and theatrics. Provoking an individual interpretation from each viewer, the exhibition is an invitation into the celestial realm of the artist’s personal mindscape. Born in 1974 in Tehran, Iran, Khorramian lives and works in New York. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received her undergraduate degree at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and her MFA at Columbia University, New York.

Her work takes theatre and the spectacle as its point of departure, to explore aspects of human nature and emotional states of consciousness, and the possibilities of drawing as a medium. She combines animation and drawing in order to capture and emphasises particular stages of the art-making process. The animations look to cinema in its juxtaposition of moving image and sounds and incline to drawing and printmaking for the possibilities of chance accidents, the manipulation of found material and the mark of the human trace.

Her experimental animations use her own monoprints and drawings as tools for storytelling. Stop-motion animation can alter the representation of time, giving mundane scenarios a mythical, out-of-time quality, allowing her to stage narratives that are subjective accounts of historic event, ancient myths and biblical themes. By removing cultural and historic specificity from these narratives, she examines the essence of their visual forms and emotional content. She has exhibited internationally, including solo shows in New York, Vienna, and Dubai. Here are some of them: Sentients, Fine Art Center Gallery – University of Arkansas, USA (2020); Saturns Neckless, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2016); Midnight Moment: Laleh Khorramian, Times Square, New York, USA (2014) and Water Panics in the Sea, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, USA (2012).