Gita Meh
Education
1997 MFA, California Institute of The Arts, Creative & Critical Writing/Integrated Media program, Professor Jon Wagner, one year Study, pending, Valencia, CA
1996 BFA, California Institute of The Arts, Visual Arts, Valencia, CA
1992 P’ART, Painting, Professor Bernd Mac, Stuttgart, Germany
1989 Freie Kunst Schule, Graphic Design, Painting, Zuffenhousen, Germany
1983 Academia Delle Belle Art’i, Drawing, Florence, Italy
1981 New Andish Azadegan, School of Visual Arts, Tehran, Iran
1976 Private Studies, Professor Petgar, Painting, Tehran, Abbas Abad, Iran
Born in Tehran, Iran in 1963, she lives and works in Los Angeles, Tehran and Dubai In 1979 the Islamic Revolution marked for me the beginning of a new avant-garde forms of visual expression in Iran. It was in 1983 during Iran Iraq war that my parents had to migrate to the West, where I continued to study and pursuit art. My ongoing body of work deconstructs my Middle Eastern and Western culture as I reconstruct and reinforce the best of both traditions. My work promotes multiculturalism by using visual and written languages as tools to form a space of human interaction and cultural integration. I draw from my personal history and its implications in modern Middle Eastern society to reconstruct the notion of Islamic/Middle Eastern art through conceptual art.
I examine how identity is shaped by differences in language, gender, ethnicity and culture, desire, exile, solitude and freedom. I allow each spectator to re-create his or her own experience of my created cross-cultural spaces. My art adds a new substance to multiculturalism, giving advancement to the nearing of cultural differences between East and the West. My work introduces a dialog that critiques the human form, human word and the human home. My art speaks about distributions of cultures. I take the initiative using my cross-cultural resources to achieve a broader form of integration.
My work creates visual thinking. I understand my initial impulse to form and word. I work on diverse canvases of textural material. Female bodies transfigure from nude to veiled into Alphabeta. Woman’s removed body hair becomes surrounding walls. Onions become an abundance of nourishing breasts. Glitter is brushed as if paint. Scanner becomes my digital camera. Sugar becomes a projection screen as images melt. Hand painted fountain tiles become architectural facades. Persian carpets become my white canvas. Painted laptops convert to flying carpets. Koranic verse becomes running horses. Fresh apples become paintings and hang from the ceiling till they disintegrate in time. I fire clay homes to build my own cities. And food becomes digestible art. As I express my visual vocabulary in a desire to point dot by dot to contemporary Islam and the west in this present.
