Artist Lecture: Laleh Khorramian

This presentation is sponsored by the University of Tennessee School of Art Programming Committee.

Laleh Khorramian’s practice incorporates the cosmological thinking of ancient cultures, their complex mythologies, and evocative spiritual vocabularies, with her imagined worlds,
synthesizing them into “histories” that are both futuristic and ancient. Khorramian approaches her work as a series of experiments with the process of chance as a starting point for
discovering possibilities of the unknown, whose details and outcomes she then investigates and reposition. In a vacillating process between macro and micro views of painted landscapes and incidental spaces, Khorramian integrates fiction with spectacle and theater to explore the transience of living matter and beings and its cycles of depletion and plenitude.

Her work of the past decade has spanned stop motion animation films, sound, monoprints, drawings, painted landscapes, portraits, and collage. By removing cultural or historical specificity from her narratives, she uses the ordinary to portray the epic, the universal, and the transient, in a search for worlds just beyond the concrete, material one around us.