ghosts-above_ghosts-below.dxf
Lela Shahrzad Welch
March 15 - April 20, 2025
ghosts-above_ghosts-below.dxf
Lela Shahrzad Welch is a seeker of a culture rather than a participant. That role has left an indelible mark on their artistic practice, explored through mythopoeia, sculpture, and performance. As a child of a woman who left Iran in 1978, she was raised with American idealism and Persian conservatism, which took the form of strict discipline and cultural ambiguity. The stringent expectations of that lingering world, inconsistent with the freedoms and desires of an American adolescent, coupled with language barriers and a family struggling with mental health, severed her connection to a Persian lineage and fueled in her a rebellion and drug addiction.
As a sober artist, she weaves that influence into her performances and sculptures, drawing inspiration from traditional Persian imagery and the arabesque as a storytelling framework to create work that considers the role and effects of translation and emerging technology. Welch utilizes CNC fabrication and technology to explore the limitations of indirect knowledge. Simply, their practice considers how language, translation, and technology have affected art and the oral histories of the Persian diaspora.
ghosts-above_ghosts-below.dxf at Left Field Gallery showcases metal “tapestries” inspired by a short story written by Welch and adapted from a tale in Ferdowsi’s 11th-century epic poem Shahnameh (The Book of Kings) which is considered a seminal work in the shaping of Persian language and culture. The steel and ceramic objects were all fabricated using CNC machinery: 3D-printed ceramics, CNC waterjet, and CNC plasma. Loss is not just built into the storytelling but also the imagery as it moves through different computer systems and file types. The show itself becomes a sort of divine market.
Lela Shahrzad Welch
Lela Shahrzad Welch, (b.Tahlequah, Oklahoma) exhibited at The Momentary (Bentonville, AR), Keystone Art Space (Los Angeles), Napa Art Gallery (Camarillo, CA), Mesa Gallery (San Diego, CA), Atkinson Gallery (Santa Barbara, CA), SOA Gallery (Long Beach, CA, and The Art, Design and Architecture Museum (Santa Barbara, CA) in addition to various public projects across the Central Coast of California.
Welch has participated in residencies such as Bemis Art Center (Summer 2025), Industry of the Ordinary, and INVERSE Performance Art Festival and received fellowships from the San Luis Obispo Arts Council and the University of California, Santa Barbara where she is currently the 2024-2025 artist-in-residence. They have collaborated with artists in Panama, New York, Beijing, and Switzerland and have been mentioned in various publications including Art & America, eFlux’s Art and Education, and SLO Life Magazine.
In 2021, she studied with the virtual first experimental art school, Dark Study. Welch graduated in 2018 with a BFA in Art & Design from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, with the Life Achievement Award and received their MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara, under the esteemed Chancellor’s Fellowship. Welch graduated with the prestigious Ron Newby Award and as a Mind and Machine Intelligence award winner. Welch is currently a Lecturer in the Art and Design department at California Polytechnic State University and lives and works in Los Osos, CA.
