Empire of Exile:

 

Observations on the Art of Massoumeh Jian

By  Donald Brackett

  
                    “I shall survive, by cunning, stealth and exile…”

               James Joyce

                           “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

 

 

 

Portrait of the artist as a middle-aged Iranian Woman: there are some artists amongst us who practice metaphysical mnemonics and Jian is one of them.  This is not quite as exotic as it sounds at first, though the exotic is by its very nature the inherent quality most recognized in the work produced by this kind of artist.   The word mnemonics refers to any method of technique used to enhance memory, and the functions of remembering, especially as exemplified by the actual memorization of vast quantities of oral knowledge, such as that done in the Middle Ages.

 

Her work also reminds us, hauntingly in fact, that we still in many ways occupy a territory together which has yet to move that far away from the middle Ages, or to evade that far-reaching grasp of its superstitions.  What is she memorizing in her work?  In what way is it a mnemonics?

 

One must look closely.  For as the French author Antoine Ste. Exupery once remarked: “ what is essential is invisible to the eye and can only be seen with the heart…”And what can be seen with the heart while contemplating the occasionally painful images that Jian’s idiosyncratic style creates?  The heart sees itself, as if reflected in a painted or drawn mirror.

 

Indeed, as the writer Lisa Matthews has pointed out: “ Her cropped self portraits focus on hand gestures and facial expressions, but they reveal a deeper spiritual and philosophical struggle unfolding in an artist who is trying to come to terms with her past, her memories, her culture and her religion.

 

What has occurred to me while studying the deeply moving faces which Jian depicts is precisely the fact that like the unveiling required by removal of the traditional female robes, her art work involves a similar unveiling of the heart, an opening-up gesture that we all need.

Her often tender works, sometimes on canvas, but usually on large scale mylar in luscious monochrome earth tones, are emblems of an enigma.  They are visual passports and emotional records of the state of Exile, whether freely chosen or otherwise imposed from without. 

As such, they are often as gentle as a diary and sometimes as gritty as a photo-journalist’s political commentary.

 

The question of politically engaged or socially committed art is a complex one.  In this case it is not so much a case of an activist artist producing overt political art devoted to awakening change, but rather a diagram of the ever changing elements of our lives, a diagram of emotion and the energies  it contains, a veritable diagram of change itself.

 

Thus she is making a political gesture merely by producing paintings and drawing in an age where popular art is more commonly associated with mixed media, photo-based constructions, or outright technologically inspired digital images.  The second outright rebellion, which is codified in her striking works, is that of her insistence on maintaining a fidelity to the human image, the human face, and the ancient art of portraiture.  In the 21st century, the act of making a recognizable portrait is already a subversive act.

 

Even though she also utilizes photography and video in the production process of her final images drawn and painted on mylar, her allegiance to depicting the “landscape of the face” is what makes her so experimental in these days of art with extension cords.  In the end, what she explores so vividly is really what the critic Guy Davenport once called a “geography of the imagination”.  This psychological geography is the result of living the perennial state of exile associated with individuals (but especially visual artists)whose characters and personalities are larger than those permitted by so many of the countries in our world.

 

These countries, many of which are still embedded in an earlier part of living history, are too small for the minds and hearts of those people who must seek more psychic space:  The Exiles.

 

It is this unique presentation that reveals her drawings, paintings, photographs and videos to be more than mere political activism: while they appear to portray the face, they invite us to see the face as a mirror of the heart.  And her paintings polish that mirror, but they do not seek an impossible resolution to the paradoxes and contradictions of life on earth in our conflicted societies.

 

In fact, her entire art practice is not founded on the unearthing of answers but rather on the isolation of key questions and their potential directions, in what she has described an “open ended narrative that can be read from both ends….” This phrase sums up most accurately what it feels like to “walk” through the word of her works.

 

The artist carries her history in her heart and allows it ot be superimposed over the shared history of us all.   In the faces of her portraits and the forms of her figures we can be witnesses.  What we witness is the effects of exile, the means of survival, and the appropriate degree of cunning and stealth in order to navigate the rough waters of acceptance and rejection.

 

In their passage past our eyes, striding by with softness yet strength, we can see her poetic and artistic activity in its clearest light: as her method for memorizing her history , of memorizing our present, and of memorizing the future.  That is her special gift, memorizing the future.  That, and the ability to communicate so very clearly with a unique nation, on that is not three-dimensional but is perhaps four-dimensional:  the empire of exile.   She speaks on their behalf.
She speaks of exile…. and the beauty of perpetual return.

 

DONAL BRACKETT