Post Stagecraft

Exhibit dates: September 5 – October 19, 2008

During the fall of 2008, Redux Contemporary Art Center was delighted to present the Iranian born and Los Angeles-based artist Amir H. Fallah. Fallah explores an exciting aesthetic employing a number of different mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation. He is simultaneously the founder and creative director of the international contemporary art and culture magazine Beautiful/Decay.

For Redux, Fallah showcased new work featuring an update to his well-known illustrious fort/terrariums. Fallah deconstructed his fort structure, leaving a large and open 7′ x 14′ pedestal platform in the center of the gallery, supporting a myriad of self-referential objects. These immersive installations, recently presented at the Nathan Larramendy Gallery, lie at the core of Fallah’s artistic production. Childhood memories, found objects and invasive sculptural constructions submit the spectator to a spontaneous, playful yet somber universe. Each sculpture was built from household knick-knacks, flower pots and seemingly random chosen objects which unfold a private boyhood landscape referencing a time past and lost.

Amir Fallah’s intuitive approach mixed with his use of ready-made objects link his work to the Surrealists objet trouvé. But in Fallah’s work today we meet a different scavenger, one that collects and recycles the notion of remembrance and cultural heritage. He seeks a new poetry of memory, one that can retrace and encompass our multi-complex society of today and yesterday, both personal and universal. In addition, Fallah’s work speaks to elements of art history as he challenges the idea of pedestal presentation and deconstructs the notion of singularity. This postmodern approach causes his sculptural items to literally fall off the pedestal and unite as one large installation, rather than a collection of individual objects.

This exhibition was supported in part by the Art Institute of Charleston.

Read more about the exhibition in this article by the Charleston City Paper!

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