Shohreh Mehran
Shohreh Mehran’s method for making art is simple: she photographs her subjects, digitally manipulates the color, backgrounds and compositions of the photographs, prints them, and paints the result with precision. This seems like a straight-forward 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 avoiding the photographer. Shohreh is, therefore, a photo-realist painter only in a strict and skewed sense: her work does not simply represent a reality, it represents a reality in the act of escaping representation, and in so doing, it presents a politicized urban scene without recourse to overt political statements.
This tension also animates Shohreh's later canvases of Tehran schoolgirls. These young women, dressed in Islamic school uniforms, are always “headless”, framed almost exclusively from neck down. On the few occasions when the painter’s gaze tilts up to frame their heads, the women cover their faces, close their eyes, or turn their backs -- and this avoidance is unmistakably playful, lively, and ironic. The girls are “properly” covered up in accordance with the requirements of religious and legal decency in current Iran, but they are anything but docile or repressed. They are in control of the scene, setting the terms for representation, and controlling the power of the gaze that frames them. Instead of reducing them to a repetitive sameness, the uniform hijab weirdly and counter-intuitively individualizes these women, and sets them in relief against the drab urban setting in which they exist.
