Persiana Americana

Below Grand’s current exhibition, Persiana Americana, curated by Amanda Millet-Sorsa (a new member of the gallery’s collective) presents the work of three artists: Astrid Dick, Yasue Maetake, and Armita Raafat. In the curatorial statement Millet-Sorsa elucidates the title of the exhibition, also the title of a painting included in the exhibition by Astrid Dick, Persiana Americana (Pornografia) (2022). “Persiana Americana,” Millet-Sorsa writes, in Argentine Spanish, is the name given to what in English is called a Venetian blind, but for Venetians—whose merchants must have brought them to their city from Persia—is called a “Persiana.” The title, with its implicit notion of travel: through culture, material goods, and language, together with the manifold associations both physical and historical, is apt and intentional. The trade routes and communication across and between continents represents not only the recursive and continuing flow of people and material, but also artists and their works—and this continues, as we see at Below Grand. Millet-Sorsa brought the artists presented here together through a process of dialogue—the artists also participated in the final combination of works exhibited, rather than Millet-Sorsa simply choosing to make selections in an overarching way. This generosity and courage to trust has clearly been a success.

Yasue Maetake’s sculpture Sarasōju (2023) comprises a variety of materials: retroreflective beads, casted concrete, steel, resin, brass, verdigris, copper, silk. This aggregate is vertical in orientation; it looks organic, like a small tree, with silk adorning branches above and earth like concrete at its base. The combined constituent parts are a beautiful sequence of different densities, colors, and haptic surfaces. It sits atop a low plinth, reaching over five feet in height in the back room, standing votive-like without any overt spiritual reference apart from the silk attachments that recall the silk bows on branches in a Shinto temple. Maetake trained in glass art in both Japan and the Czech Republic before moving to New York City, and interestingly, completed a residency in the studio of El Anatsui in Ghana and Nigeria, the two artists sharing a facility for combining found and accumulated elements.

Usually working with both sculpture and installation, Armita Raafat contributes Untitled 03, (2017). It is a modular structure that sits in the corner of the room, halfway between floor and ceiling. Resin, iridescent fabric, mirrors, and paint are all used. Intense ultramarine blue, pale green tinted mirror, and porous scrim trap and reflect light. The work recalls Islamic architecture as well as minimalist strategies of repetition and permutation. An organic accumulation is also inferred—like honey combs or cellular forms. Raafat was born in Chicago and raised in Tehran, studying at Al-Zahra University and later the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Biographical narrative is an important aspect in this exhibition. Astrid Dick is from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and currently based in Paris. Together with the painting Persiana Americana (Pornografia), a vertical painting of many bright horizontal gestural lines of red and yellow that fills most of the gallery wall directly facing Orchard Street through a floor to ceiling window, Dick has four small works using paint and/or found materials. In the case of Tivoli Disco (2022), it is black oil paint on a thick piece of found foam with a tiny disco ball suspended from a nail in front of the black ground. A humorous and astute figure ground composition of darkness and faceted light. In 2002, Dick was awarded a PhD in economics from MIT. Having split time between art and economic research for many years, she left her life as a university professor to become a full time artist. All the extraordinary life trajectories here speak of exilian resourcefulness as an extra-national experience that is thoroughly present in these undogmatic and openly poetic works.