Artist: Mahsa Soroudi
Exhibition: 7500 Miles
Website: http://www.mahsasoroudi.com
Mahsa Soroudi was born and educated in Iran and moved to Southern California in 2013. Soroudi was exposed to art from a young age, having been born into a non-traditional Muslim family where her parents were more open to the arts. Her father even had his own sort of art academy. Her place of birth was a metropolitan area and even had art museums and galleries. Having always been exposed to the arts, she pursued them. After deciding to make her own life decisions at about the age of thirty, she married and her and her husband moved out of their home country. Eventually, they ended up in Newport Beach where they spent their longest stay in a place away from their hometown. For her project, 7500 Miles, her inspiration was her sister and her friends in Iran who were artists and who she felt were not getting the exposure they deserved. Soroudi saw the struggles Middle Eastern women faced when attempting to show their art, especially since they were fighting a patriarchal society in Iran. This project was meant to educate Western audiences about the situation Iranian women are facing.
As a project, 7500 Miles is a collection of works of art. There is a large variety in style and media. I will focus on the work of Mahshid Soroudi, not the curator of the work, but as artist whose work particularly caught my eye. Her work consists of various pieces of work made with acrylic on canvas. In general, her work has muted colors mixed with a few bright or contrasting colors. The background of the paintings are normally scratchy or faded in lines. They have a very “painted” feeling, as you would see when painting the first contrasting colors on a wall with a paintbrush. They also look as through they would have a jagged or bumpy texture to them. In contrast, the women features in the works are very fine in detail. There is hardly any muddiness to the figures. They consist of very careful and meticulous lines to express every fold of clothing and every detail of the face. Overall, the works place a strong emphasis on the figures.
The curator, Mahsa Soroudi, has the plan of exposing Iranian women’s work in a different way. She wanted their work to be shown as works of art and not necessarily as Iranian womens’ works of art. This curation definitely shows that. Not only is the work modern and beautiful, but it does not have the connotations of the Middle East attached to it. The work can show its message without being connotated first. For the specific artist I looked at, Mahshid Soroudi, the work expressed issues surrounding women and gender. In the work, we can see the message of women attempting to deal with the constant vigilance of society. The women in the works attempt to hide from the scrutiny, to no prevail.
Mahsa Soroudi curated the 7500 Miles project in an effort to help exhibit Iranian women’s art work. The variety in work was astonishing and very different from the normal political work of Iran we see. The point of the curation, to be able to show the work as art instead of art connoted with all the issues of Iran, surely prevailed. Here we can see the beauty and individual issues exposed by the art. I related to the work of Mahshid Soroudi and the issue of women being pressed by society exposed in the work. As a woman in an unusual field, Computer Science, I often feel as though my work may be scrutinized in a different manner than a man’s work may be simply because it is the work of a woman. Mahshid Soroudi’s art resonated with me in that sense, and if it weren’t for Mahsa Soroudi, the curator, I may have never been exposed to that connection with the work.
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