I am drawn to antique jeweled brooches and pins, mostly the ones depicting insects, because of their beauty, details, patterns, complicated shapes, colors, and more importantly the constant movement in them of light and reflection. My aesthetic is rooted in this play of color and luster.
This newest body of work seeks those values in modern western technologies and to draw them from contemporary materials such as holographic film, vinyl wrap, and acrylic sheeting.
My abstract installations employ rigid geometric compositions in order to emphasize the optical effects set off by my chosen palettes. The method is similar to the hard-edge painting of the mid-1900s, but my work also considers Pop-art and post-modern strategies of appropriation by employing materials from automobile culture and commercial display signage.
I want to bring the beauty of gems and jewelry into the viewer’s present experience, the immediate visual impact, so that the experience is not about the history of the designer or the design, but about the effect of what is right before one’s eyes.
What I most want to do in my work is to express the joyous sense of pleasure I derive from seeing the world. That sense of pleasure grows directly out of my cultural heritage. My influences include traditional Persian painting, miniatures, jewelry, tiling, textiles, and architecture. These cultural sources have instilled in me a deep appreciation for luxurious colors and textures. Reflective surfaces intensify the colors in my work and expand the presence of light.
LADAN SEDIGHI: IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
By Peter Frank
For a movement and mindset so fixated on reductive clarity and formal austerity, minimalism has proven a rich, durable seam for artists to mine over its more-than-half century – or, if you would, since its prefiguration in the European avant-garde over a hundred years ago. It should be no surprise, in fact, that a style so elemental and self-effacing should invite a vast range of discourse and experimentation, and one so rigorous should challenge creative perception to such an inventive extent. Minimalism, almost despite itself, is an artistic language especially suited for the modern world – and perhaps even more for the post-modern, digital universe.
One perhaps unexpected, but notably enduring, aspect of the minimalist aesthetic is its relative permissiveness. When the movement emerged as a self-declared position in the 1960s it presented itself as an inquiry into suppression and negation, a search for the sublime within the void, an unpacking of absolutes. But it contained obvious positive notions of materiality and a monkish focus on intellectual process and the unfolding of serial formation. The obdurate monumentality of major sculptural works and ambitiously sequenced designs allowed, and still allows, for great variation in form, composition, texture, and color – enough for any artistic sensibility to exploit minimalist language in the forging of a personal trajectory. This availability allowed minimalism to become a “big-tent” phenomenon, bringing forth the simultaneous or successive emergence and practice of geometric abstraction, postwar constructivism, hard-edge painting, abstract classicism, finish/fetish, light & space, and op art (among other movements in the minimalist orbit of the 1960s).
With minimalist practice now available to several generations of artists, the individual traits and modes that characterize such artists’ work are notable less for being minimalist or coming from minimalism than they are for distinguishing individual innovation and exploration against a stylistic framework. Minimalism’s pared-down attitude and pared-down forms are available as conceptual as well as formal armature; it is each minimalist’s obligation to harness the aesthetic to their artistic needs. This is the point in her evolution at which Ladan Sedighi finds herself currently. Sedighi has determined that minimalism provides her the best context for her investigations, affording on the one hand a compositional lucidity that maintains a crucial balance between order and beauty and on the other an interplay between the optical effects of various materials and the field of vision itself – and, arguably, the extension of that field into the viewer’s real and/or somatic space.
Sedighi professes a preoccupation with luster, brilliance, reflectivity, and other retinally oriented experiences, experiences distant from the crude, industrial, even debased materials normally associated with minimalism per se. She does not avoid such gritty stuff but selects it and puts it to work on a very different level. Beauty, of a vibrant and metamorphic kind, engages Sedighi and directs her to the employment of such materials as vinyl wrap, acrylic sheeting, and holographic film, with their tensile suspension, their reflectivity, and most of all their spectral response to available light.
This sensuous approach to visual pleasure Sedighi credits to her Iranian heritage, with its aesthetic of glorious color and surface – and of minimized structure and composition, whether manifested in decorative painting, narrative book illustration, jewelry, or monumental architecture. Luminance is one of the most evident qualities in Sedighi’s art, quite by design; literally and figuratively it embodies her native culture as an expression not just of cultural pride but of childhood memory. Sedighi seeks beauty because she was raised with it, and she wants to share the potentially transformative effect of beholding and absorbing the beauty her simple but still intricate compositions provide.
Living as she does at the intersection of Persian tradition aesthetics and California ambience, Sedighi finds herself conveying notions of beauty through the framework(s) of finish/fetish and light & space art, art whose fabrication and/or relation to atmosphere seduces the eye no less extravagantly than does Iranian art and artifact (certainly in Sedighi’s apprehension). The California versions of minimalism, however, challenge perception as much as gratify it. They obscure the nature of their materials and even the nature of light itself, positing a machine-tooled craft and quasi-architectural regard for form and space. This manner well suits Sedighi’s aesthetic without imposing a particular formal vocabulary or mode of working.
Ultimately, Sedighi proposes, the experience of light, color, form, and space depends on the viewer’s own particular vantage, as well as on the nature of the materials and their positioning – precisely the acknowledgment of subjective position light & space art admits. In a way, Sedighi choreographs us by choreographing her elements – and lures us thereby into a perceptual contrapposto with her vivid squares and bands and interrupted grids. Indeed, many of her paintings are multi-paneled, affording us hybrid experiences wherein the same artwork reflects light back at us, absorbs us into a richly colored field, and sets up at least the grounds for a rhythmic internal structure.
Sedighi’s, quite evidently, is a different take on minimalism, drawing lyric association and enchanting effect from a practice associated with diffidence, blankness, and unpolished substance. She seeks no mere elegance, however. Sedighi reconsiders minimalism the way pattern painting did, as a cohesive method with a potential for broad stylistic range and even internal contradiction. Orthodox minimalism, regarding itself as a modernist phenomenon, resisted such contradiction. But minimalism was in fact a gateway to post-modernism, with its rejection of teleology and embrace of the ahistorical non sequitur – a discourse driven by a search for alternate orders and a valorization of the personal. It is among the logical discontinuities of post-modernism that Ladan Sedighi finds her individuated minimalism, playful, alluring, and intimate, born of and borne on a neutral gridded network that in her hands does not long remain neutral.
Los Angeles
August 2024
