Are You Buying These With Loonies or Toonies?

In the exhibition at Red Head Gallery, Esfahani is particularly exploring stereotype as otherness and Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence, which manifests as a split between appearance of an original and its expression as different and repetitive. This body of work is inspired by artifacts from the Aga Khan Museum’s collection, collected objects and imagery during Esfahani’s artist residency in Mexico City, and collected Canadiana objects. Her work questions displacement, dissemination, and reinsertion of culture through the repetitive nature of stereotypical imagery and uses the language of stereotype in order to destabilize the subjectification and cultural identification that occurs through stereotypical discourse.

 

In the exhibition at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Esfahani is responding to the question “where are you from?”, that many immigrants are often asked, by exploring Tom Thomson’s legacy as a national icon and other symbols traditionally associated with Canadian identity from a diasporic lens. Through various multimedia works that layer stereotypical Canadian references with Iranian cultural motifs, interventions with found objects, and multiple painted and 3D printed replicas of Thomson paintings and artefacts, Esfahani transforms the gallery into a physical third space that dissolves the boundaries between both Iranian and Canadian cultures. –curator: Shannon Bingeman

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