More on: Visual Art

For us Iranians, carpets are not just objects but a sacred part of family existence: We are born, live, and die on carpets.

An artist’s solitary toil often elicits comparison with the life of a cloistered monk, as both vocations navigate between isolation and communion.

Silence is a deprivation all its own. It is a vast desert where one’s chitchat and puffed-up sense of self go to die. By fasting from myself, I gave my soul a fighting chance to pass through the empty desert and enter the distant garden. As I slowed down and listened to the poetry of Scripture, my soul found the rhythm of being beloved. It was lush, green nourishment. The word of God was a feast all its own.

Our ideals may seem broken and fractured, but they can be remade into a more beautiful reality. As the series progressed, the flowers gained back their glorious colors, celebrating the richness of life while showing the growing pains that come with finding a new form.

In Judaism, we are taught to not fully complete an object, to leave a sliver incomplete until Moshiach (the Messiah) comes to help us rebuild the Temple. As I relate this to my paintings, I am not sure they are truly finished.

Hardly anything is not fragile now; the world may be in the most fragile state of our lifetime.

Growing up between silence and discussion, repression and resilience, shaped my understanding of freedom as both political and personal. This understanding informs my art today.

As we stand eye to eye with one of nature’s greatest killing machines, in awe of the jagged teeth that maul and maim, we are also aware that the life force that once animated this death-dealing predator has gone, and the formaldehyde in which it floats is merely delaying its decay.

I strongly believe that for a Jew to make art, one has to be steeped in Jewish culture, as well as the contemporaneous culture of the West. I found my way into Judaism through the biblical story of the Exodus, especially the idea that each Jew identifies with this story as if they were present at Mount Sinai, because, as the Talmud explains, all Jewish souls, present and future, were at Mount Sinai to witness the divine.

While I was uninterested in the Bible stories of Sunday school, the quiet ritual of the service and the music appealed to me.