past

Pardiss Amerian

Dew and Dust
May 1st, 2024 - June 10th, 2024

n the tradition of illuminated manuscripts, the process of assembling a book is multifaceted: from the preparation of the parchment (and later paper) to the mixing of pigments, to the cadre of painters and calligraphers who painstakingly composed images and text, and then finally, to its binding. Throughout its production, there are a number of hands involved in the making of a manuscript. Within Islamic art, paintings in manuscripts have commonly “functioned as illustrations of written narratives and thus provided descriptive or interpretative augmentations to a reading experience, while simultaneously adding an aesthetic dimension to the production of Islam’s written heritage.” (1)

The illuminated manuscript has historically served both religious and secular purposes. Commissioned by wealthy rulers and patrons, the illumination of a book most often took place in a workshop environment. Central to courtly life, book ateliers created both manuscripts and paintings, but also a variety of other luxury items. (2) By the sixteenth century, Persian artists in particular “were keen to align their occupation with that of calligraphers, since both fields required mastery of linearity, contour, balance, and rhythm of form.”(3)

Drawing from this visual tradition, artist Pardiss Amerian utilizes the conventions of illuminated painting —such as its history and layered process— to create ethereal, abstracted works. These oil on canvas paintings show traces of the illuminated tradition particularly in-between the contrasting fields of colour where biomorphic and lattice patterning emerge to provide a painterly kaleidoscope of imagery found in manuscript paintings. As Amerian points out, her approach involves not only thinking through historic Persian literary prose, but also investigating more experimental methods of image making: “The forms I arrive at are used as cut-out tools for monoprinting,” continues Amerian, and “the process of pressing paper together creates suction and pushes diluted paint around when lifted off the flat surface; outlines are approximated and gaps are left behind while the material is animated by chance.”(4)

What starts as a studied meditation on manuscript painting, opens up to experimentation with
form and colour that is further pushed on the canvas. “Divergences'' remarks Amerian, “become generative and determine the next steps.”(5) While her method of adding and subtracting imagery and colour has material connections to modern art and the visual language of abstraction, there is another, metaphoric way to see these images: as part of the fragmented lineage of manuscript painting. No longer part of a bound folio of images and stories, historic manuscript images are now often seen as stand-alone art objects that have circulated across the globe through auction houses and housed in collections primarily based in Europe and North America.(6)

Amerian’s processed-based work also envelopes this fragmentary history of manuscript
painting. Well-known historical narratives such as the Alf laylah wa laylah (One Thousand and One Nights) and Nizami Ganjavi’s 12th century epic poem Haft Peykar (Seven Beauties), tales that have also significantly contributed to the broader understanding of the manuscript tradition, underpin the imagery within Amerian’s canvases. While these stories are interwoven with the materiality of contemporary painting, they also insist on a dialogical understanding of storytelling and its visual representations. Indeed, these stories are part of living traditions that continue to resonate and be reimagined.  

The paintings in Amerian’s exhibition Dew and Dust, combine the narrative and style of Persian painting to showcase the ways in which these images and stories continue to have parlance in contemporary art – and due to the fragmentation of time, patronage and connoisseurship, simply have not been told enough. Pardiss Amerian’s works are not fixed in the past, but resist a singular reading, and as she notes, “might urge the visualization of an uncharted elsewhere, for each viewer to wander in.”(7)

DAVID CONNOLLY

Natural World

August 18th– September 10th 2022

Third Rail Gallery is excited to present Natural World by New York City based, Australian artist David Connolly. This is David's second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Natural World, exhibition includes drawings, paintings, and text based work that propose complex questions about natural resources, power structures, and the media's role in shaping our reality, images, and truths.

By confronting systematic power structures, David's work challenges audiences to question historical contingencies and avoid the idealist trap of universal meanings and values.

David Connolly (Australia, b.1973) is a New York City based multidisciplinary artist whose work situates itself in the larger field of new media, sculpture, installations and photography. For more than a decade he has chosen to live and work outside of my native Australia, immersing myself in the cultures, languages and belief systems of New York, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Dublin. he has gained extended exposure to issues that are at once culturally specific and globally applicable---specifically, the themes of geopolitics and global economies in relation to the themes of institutional power, migration and environmental degradation.

installation image. Courtesy of the gallery

installation image. Courtesy of the gallery

CAROLINE MONNET

PIZANDAWATC

Jan 17 – Mar 23, 2024

Caroline Monnet’s comprises a survey of her prolific production, centering on a new series of sculptures exploring language reclamation and intergenerational transmission. The title, Pizandawatc, comes from the traditional name of Monnet’s family before surnames were changed in Kitigan Zibi by the Oblates. Meaning “the one who listens” in Anishinaabemowin, the title also honours the artist’s great-grandmother, Mani Pizandawatc, who was the first in her family to have her territory divided into reserves. Exploring the notion of territory from the perspective of cultural attachment and ancestral memory, the exhibition articulates new visions that harken both to Indigenous legacies and futures.

The new body of work in Pizandawatc continues Monnet’s considerations of sculpture and sound as linked to temporality, orality, and knowledge sharing. Driven by an impulse to materialize language into durable physical form in order to preserve it, Monnet attempts to counter the ephemeral nature of the spoken word and to reclaim the Anishinaabe language by recording its soundwaves in layered native and industrial wood. Additional bronze elements capture shapes of weathered wood naturally modified by experience on the terrain, gesturing to matter and the elements. Evoking the relationship of speech to the land and how the Anishinaabeg traditionally named the land, these works examine the influence of topography on the rhythms of languages and cultures, envisioning the territory as a living form of knowledge transfer over generations. Each piece depicts a different phrase encapsulating the power of nature and the passage of time.

PIZANDAWATC

Mar 12 –May 5, 2019

SAMUEL STABLER