Iranian American artist Sheree Hovsepian’s wall-based assemblages incorporate photographic prints into three-dimensional vignettes with nylon, ceramics, string, nails, and walnut wood in deep, custom-built box frames. Her compositions are imbued with an incisive recognition of the politics surrounding the body, emphasising the relationships between the people and things that are captured by her camera’s lens. Hovsepian conceives of her practice as a collaboration between bodies and manufactured materials, and the image of the artist herself – or sometimes her sister, playing the role of stand-in – often appears in her work. Her assemblages also frequently incorporate elements in ceramic, a material that – like a photograph – takes an impression, goes through a process of chemical transformation, and, when fired in a kiln, is always accompanied by the threat of failure. Hovsepian’s work for The Milk of Dreams continues her investigation into the materiality of photography and its representational, symbolic, and syntactical qualities. In these works, fragmented parts of the body are deployed as formal elements in a visual vocabulary of abstracted shapes and lines. As the artist has said, “For me, the body becomes a site of stratified consciousness. Assemblage becomes a metaphor for this.”
Ian Wallace
