Gita Meh

Born in 1963, Tehran, Iran. 29 years had passed since I last lived in Iran. During 29 years of migration, I was able to examine how identity is shaped by differences in language, gender, ethnicity and culture, desire, exile, solitude and freedom, allowing me to re-create my own experience of cross-cultural spaces.

Finally, in 2011 I came back to Iran, luggage filled with files and memories of half of the globe. Before her death, my mother was helping me un-pack the geographies, the languages, the many mountains, faces, cultures, brushes, and rolls of canvases, eyebrows and tongues that constituted my artistic past practices. Together, we looked at images of so many different kinds of “clouds” on my Apple laptop. I realized I was home.

The Surrealist Manifesto by the poet Andre Breton was proclaimed in Paris in 1924. His goal was to liberate thinking, language, and human being and experience from oppressive boundaries, and we are still within those boundaries today. Breton’s revolutionary move towards liberation of the human mind from violence and ignorance echoes throughout my work and is focused in my current project proposal “Earth, Landscape of Soul.” Which in the broadest sense is to create visual thinking. My art attempts to expand surrealism into a merging of cultural differences between East and West, by brushing Earth as one soil, one soul.

This project examines with oil on canvas the fact that Art is a nourishing phenomenon, a meta-milk, if you will. The art and the act of painting is a duplication of mental pixels, a pattern the creator sets out to translate and to exhibit in visual form. I want my art to ignite and to awaken spectators from the memory pixels of their own unconscious, to bring these collective archetypes into illuminated experiences.

Oil, soil, dirt, dried leaf on canvas. This is an ongoing series of landscapes that turn into roads, roads which when followed become faces, faces become nests, birds singing love songs which soon transform into soil and into another face after another tree, after another eye, watching, rain drops, growing.

And I dedicate this new series of oil paintings titled “Earth, Landscape of Soul” to Fatemeh who taught me how to make a circle, then a line, then an “i,” then another eye, then a smile.

Also I would like to thank my supporters who, with their extraordinary insight and understanding, have given me the ability and the courage to bring my visions into tangible realities.