Ario Elami

Artist Statement

A Hudson-based artist, graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts’ graduate program through Tufts University, and a composer and author besides. I claim dual citizenship as both an Iranian and North American, and have spent my life growing among the east coast and midwest.

My latest art mainly explores architecture as visceral and botanical analogy; and the tension between human design and nature on the verge of reclaiming its birthright. This work has developed in tandem with an understanding of the earliest architecture as numinous altars, upon which were laid sacrificial items such as teeth, eggs, skulls, and vertebrae; and a perception of nature as a roiling mass of aggressive life, perpetuating itself through overabundance. In this sense, architecture manifested out of spiritual violence, and was a site for the inner to become externalized.

As a consequence, my work can be read meta-textually: it depicts sacrificial sites, and is itself an act of sacrifice, driven by mysterious aesthetic passions. Our modern materialist paradigm, historically a tool of empire, and justified according to the dictates of science’s high priests, has effectively closed us off from interactions with the transcendent. I see architecture, revitalized with its primitive and mythopoeic qualities, as a portal back into that domain. How do we participate in the creative act of the cosmos? which mythologies excite us? and how do we distinguish the inorganic from the organic? I like to think of my art as paralleling the act of turning over a rotting log and finding beneath it an occulted tangle of life. These places where things seem to emerge, and where life intermingles with the fecund properties of death — where one finds a simultaneity of the erotic, excretory, and orificial — these are the sites which interest me most.

I’m also drawn to architecture for the possibilities it offers for formal games, and the visual obsessions it can give rise to. In some of my latest artwork, I’ve focused on structures of the exquisite corpse variety and notions of the grotesque. These pieces are rendered more playfully and graphically, emphasizing the sensual aspects: ribs, bulges, holes, hair. As these pieces have multiplied, they’ve started to form their own imaginary world, linking them to the capriccios of artists such as Piranesi, Gonzaga, and Boullée.

arioelami.net
[email protected]
@abebarzan