Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian artist who currently lives in New York. She was born in 1957 in Qazvin, Iran where she grew up until 1974 when she left to study art in Los Angeles. It was about this time that the Iranian Revolution occurred.

About a year after the revolution, she moved to the San Francisco Bay area and began studying at Dominican College. Eventually, she enrolled at UC Berkeley and completed her BA, MA and MFA.

After graduate school, she moved to New York and began working for Storefront Art and Architecture, a non-profit group . During this time she did not make any serious attempts at creating art.

In 1990, she returned to Iran where, after the revolution was over, the Iranian society was restructured as a traditional Islamic nation. In order to reconcile the current Iran and the one she grew up in she began her first mature body of work, the Women of Allah series.

Her work refers to the social, cultural and religious codes of Muslim societies, and the complexity of certain oppositions, such as man and woman. Neshat often emphasizes this theme with the technique of showing two or more coordinated films concurrently, creating stark visual contrasts through such motifs as light and dark, black and white, male and female.

Women of Allah (1993-97)
http://ce399.typepad.com/weblog/2005/12/the_photography.html

Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000)
http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/wy_wy_neshat_csw

Expanded Cinema Group Project

Group:  Robert, Kristen, Marcus

Tech:  Video for two projectors.

The concept behind our project is the sublime dream state.  What we are going to do is project nature scenes superimposed over each other on a wall.  On the floor of the wall will be a pillow that will have scenes of sky and clouds projected onto it.  

Part of my part was to capture footage of sky and clouds.  In addition to this I will be working on making a human silhouette that will be used to mask part of the sky scenes onto the pillow so that the clouds will be seen in the shape of a human head.

New Humans

This piece comments on man in the modern world. The concept refers to how people are taught to think a similar way through a single constructed means.