Maysha Mohamedi
Deep Seep
March 2 – March 31, 2019
Maysha Mohamedi is an Iranian-American painter who was raised in San Luis Obispo and now lives and works in Los Angeles. Her studio is located in the Fashion District in Downtown LA. She has exhibited widely in New York and Los Angeles, including exhibitions at The Lodge, The Hole, The Pit and Lowell Ryan Projects. She is also a founding member of the Los Angeles art collective, The Binder. Mohamedi is the recipient of several awards and residences, ranging from a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Tokyo, to an AICAD New York Studio Residency. Her work has been profiled in the LA Times, The Huffington Post, SF Arts Quarterly and The Conversation Art Podcast.
For the exhibition, Deep Seep, Mohamedi once again constructs a group of paintings that weave between idiosyncratic worlds that are both visible and invisible, while also being generous with a gestural language and mark-making techniques inspired by an open-ended and unrestrained use of materials. Beach tar collected near her home and rare paint, procured from Iran, are applied to the surface using unorthodox writing implements such as found crayon nubs, re-purposed coffee stirrers and a stale Red Vine candy. Freed from linguistic association, the shapes generated serve as jumping off points for improvisation, much like the calligraphic nature of her first language - Farsi - which operates simultaneously as abstract and narrative. Mohamedi's capacity to reinvent her mark-making underscore a rigorous exploration, yielding paintings that are patterned, expansive and inexplicably pleasurable.
