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03/23/09
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Profile: Iranian-American Artist Mona Shomali
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Source:
www.lookmona.com
The Strength of a Vulnerable Man
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Mona Shomali |
Mona Shomali was born in Los Angeles California in the
year 1979, the same year of the Iranian Revolution. While pregnant, her mother
fled Iran out of fear of persecution for her non-Muslim religion (Bahai Faith),
followed months later by her father. In her early years, she was raised almost
exclusively with the Iranian Diaspora, not learning English till her first day
of kindergarten. Eventually, the young family moved to the San Francisco
bay area. Mona was raised in the east bay, attended university in Santa Cruz,
and lived and worked in San Francisco where she met her husband on the N Judah
train. A few years later, she moved to New York with her husband and completed a
Masters program at NYU. Currently, Mona lives in Manhattan with her husband,
their two cats and many plants.
Her first real "rush" as an
Artist was when she was 14 years old and was introduced by her high school art
teacher to the live nude drawing group, a weekly collective that was organized
by the Berkeley Artists Guild. She became a regular, experimenting with how to
sketch and paint the human body in charcoal, watercolor and oil mediums.
Painting was always an extremely personal way of resolving the contradictions
and frustrations of living between what felt like clashing cultural
rules for women and men. More importantly, it became a way to confront the media
images of Iranian women who were black shrouded, shapeless, and sexless- as if
having no desire, voices or volitions of their own. In this way, the Iranian/
Persian "women" in the paintings became surreal and symbolic, transforming
taboos and traditional assumptions of both cultures into a more complex self
defined identity.
Fear of Choice
About the Art
Overall, Mona's art has
been most influenced by the (California) bay area figurative movement
(1950-1965), and Iranian or Iranian- American art. Of the bay area figurative
artist movement, the individuals that made the deepest impressions were:
Nathan Oliveira, Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Brown
and Manuel Neri. As far as other figurative artists, European artists
such as Matisse and Gauguin and Latino artists such as
Kahlo and Riviera were also very influential. While Iranian royal
art during the Qajar Epoch (1785-1925) fascinates in its flat ornamental style,
many other contemporary Iranian-American artists tell a narrative story in an
ethnographic language that other members of the modern and global Iranian
Diaspora can relate to. Her most admired contemporary artists are: Shirin
Neshat, Ali Dadgar, Marjane Satrapi and Taraneh Hemami.
Ode to Farogh Farrokhzad
The women are nude because
nudity can represent so many different extremes within the narrative of being
Iranian American: freedom and shame, tradition and modernity, public and
private, vulnerability and pride, ownership and selflessness, oppression and
liberation. The live model subjects of the paintings have been various Iranian
friends and relatives over the years. All the paintings are oil on canvas. This
collection took place over the course of 8 years.
The Impossible Divide of Feminine and Nature
Visit Mona's web site to see more
of her works:
www.lookmona.com
... Payvand News - 03/23/09 ... --
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