Shohreh Mehran

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Biography
Shohreh Mehran’s method of making art might seem straightforward: she photographs her subjects; digitally manipulates the color, backgrounds and compositions of those photographs; prints them; and paints the result with precision. This may seem like the typical photo-realist approach. The simplicity of the method – take a piece of life, tweak it, and represent it accurately – is immediately complicated, however, when one realizes that she is either taking photographs of photographs, or photographing subjects that are deliberately and persistently avoiding the photographer. In other words, Mehran’s subjects are either veiling themselves behind the ideology of representation, or veiling themselves altogether, avoiding representation, and presenting this avoidance itself as a subject for representation. Mehran is, therefore, a photo-realist painter only in a strict or skewed sense: her work does not simply represent a reality, it represents a reality in the act of escaping representation.
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