DURING MY FIRST VISIT with Tannaz Farsi in her Eugene, Oregon, studio, I was immediately taken with the way her work straddles dual meanings. Often at once ambiguous and excruciatingly precise, Farsi’s art uses the personal, the autobiographical, and the experiential to point to larger socio- political moments. Through sculpture, printmaking, and text, she makes a series of poignant connections, drawing out unexpected meditations. Her practice is rhizomatic, creating what Deleuze and Guattari characterized in their seminal text A Thousand Plateaus as “ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” The work defies linear narratives, each idea subsequently pulling the viewer toward another.
In Point and Line (e 74), one of her recent works, Farsi focuses on the patterns inside security envelopes, enlarging them and then printing them as etchings, which, when seen together, abstract into a study of color, shape, and line. For another piece, called Territory (e 66), the artist created a site-specific outdoor installation on the grounds of Southern Oregon University that’s made up of plants spelling out the word TERRITORY. The work simultaneously provides habitat for local wildlife and evokes historical associations with colonialism, conquest, and conflicts over land sovereignty. Despite their differences in scale, medium, and relationship to an audience, these two works are connected by underlying themes of security, social hierarchy, and power.
These themes are personal for the Iranian-born Farsi, who describes the act of immigrating as a kind of cultural amnesia, a necessary forgetting of one’s place of origin in order to assimilate into another. For me, Farsi’s work carries a kind of amnesia as well, moving among a multitude of starting points while never fully committing to any. It was this interplay of identities that interested me in her practice and led to a discussion about a major solo exhibition at Linfield Gallery, located on the campus of Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon.
Early on in our conversations, Farsi proposed working with live tulips as a central anchor for the show. A charged and complex symbol in Iranian culture, the tulip has been used to represent martyrdom, renewal, and opposition. For the Linfield exhibition, the organic messiness of bringing live tulips into the gallery would become a tangible marker for ideas of growth and renewal, while providing a counterweight to the more precise lines of her text-based work and sculpture. In the months leading up to the exhibition, a thousand tulip bulbs were housed in the University of Oregon’s greenhouses in Eugene, destined to bloom and wither in a gallery nearly a hundred miles away. While the tulips grew, Farsi finished designing two other large-scale pieces: a wall-based text work featuring the names of notable Iranian women, and an expansive linear structure referencing the Topkapi Scroll, a fifteenth-century architectural booklet attributed to the central or western region of Iran.
The resulting exhibition, The Points of Departure, opened to the public in conjunction with the spring equinox, just as the tulips were beginning to bloom. The works show the breadth of Farsi’s practice and exemplify the rhizomatic approach that I find so vital in her work. Every week the tulips changed as more flowers began to wilt and go to seed, creating an ever-morphing installation that was two parts floriculture and one part chance. By the exhibition’s close, the flowers had all gone dormant, ready for their bulbs to be packed away for the next season.
The catalog you hold in your hands represents an ambitious undertaking both by Farsi and by Linfield Gallery. This is the first catalog produced by the gallery. It’s also the first publication to bring together documentation and critical writing spanning Farsi’s artistic career. For the gallery, this is exactly the right time for such a catalog; for the artist, it is long overdue.
Linfield Gallery is committed to showcasing risk-taking projects. When curating exhibitions for our space, I seek to bring artists with unique artistic perspectives, who can provoke dialogue and new ideas both within our geographically isolated academic community and the broader public. Reaching beyond our small campus is a critical challenge in my work, so I strive to ensure that some part of our programming lives on after the exhibition closes.
This publication was designed and printed in service of this goal. Documenting Farsi’s work in The Points of Departure serves as both a snapshot of the artist’s current practice and a lens through which to view the themes and ideas of her earlier works. It is my sincere hope that this publication will serve as a thorough introduction to Farsi’s work for viewers who are currently unfamiliar with it, and as an opportunity for deeper engagement for those who already know it well.