naturenature: Kamran Samimi
January 22- March 6, 2022
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 22 from 2-5pm
Hugomento, 795 22nd St, San Francisco, CA 94107
Gallery Hours: Weds-Fri 1-6pm, Sat-Sun 1-5pm and by appt
In collaboration with Hugomento, re.riddle is pleased to present NatureNature, a solo exhibition of new work by Kamran Samimi that will run from January 22- March 6, 2022. This exhibition is the part of re.flect, a program series that spotlights one of the re.riddle gallery's artists each month. The rotating monthly series offers in-depth access into the respective processes and practices of our global community of artists.
Curatorial Statement
NatureNature, a solo exhibition of new work by Kamran Samimi, is a meditation on the poetics of nature explored through the gesture of repetition. Through the careful manipulation of line, form and light, Samimi considers how spatial intervals, recurrence, and seriality serve as salient points to contemplate the notions of temporality and persistence, physicality and immateriality, and their dialectical tensions.
Across sculpture, installation, painting, and print-making, Samimi’s quietly serene works evoke a meditative response through his simple, reductive means. Harmonizing with the notion of repetition as distinct from duplication due to intimate and subtle differences within individual occurrences, Samimi’s minimalist markings and by-hand gestures echo the complexity of tidal waves, stone formations, sunrise vs. sunset, and rain. He asks, what is the most economic expression of form to convey this and conversely, how might a work be undone by too much or demonstrative of a reduction? His fading brush strokes, cut stone, and lightweight mulberry paper all contain a certain philosophy that observes cyclical living and dying through a feat of transposition and abstraction.
Though directly made from and motivated by robust and enduring natural phenomena, Samimi’s works are fragile in effect. His paintings (see Traces, Window and Emergence Light with Emergence Dark) evoke a whispered movement in their materiality, delicate Japanese mulberry paper - and in their form, gentle, simplified and rhythmic strokes of his paintbrush. Evocative of the fluctuations and stillness of ocean swells or rain patterns, the composition reverberates the artist’s recurring movements of arm with paintbrush. Samimi’s controlled cuts into stone (see Reading Stone and Centered) are regular and irregular, simultaneously giving a sense of tension, unity and continuity. Is there significance in the duality of persistence and temporality in Samimi’s materials, and what emerges from the to and fro between them? In what way is a simplified gesture the representative of these themes in its own right?
Samimi’s abstractions distill the profundity of the natural world down to delicate trace elements. Whilst perhaps not overtly repetitive on their own, his works together present a seriality, inclusive of the symbolic repetition of his own mark-making gestures. NatureNature is a result of Samimi’s meditations with the natural world and discovering his place within the recurring questions it asks of him.
Programming
In Conversation: Dakin Hart x Kamran Samimi
Liljestrand House, Honolulu, Hawaii and via Zoom
Monday, February 14, 2022 at 12pm PST /10am Hawai'i Standard Time, HST
Join us via zoom from the historic Liljestrand House, Honolulu, Hawaii with Senior Curator Dakin Hart of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum and contemporary artist Kamran Samimi. Hart speaks with Samimi about the significance of place, the intersections of local and regional influences, multi-cultural ancestries and the synthesis of natural and modern materials in his creative practice.
Dakin Hart has been Senior Curator at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum (Long Island City, NY) since 2013. He oversees the Museum’s exhibitions, collections, catalogue raisonné, archives, and public programming, and has the daily good fortune of collaborating with Isamu Noguchi in absentia. His previous positions include Assistant Director at the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas), Artistic Director and Director of Artists in Residence at Montalvo Center for the Arts (Saratoga, CA), where he served on the Board of Trustees before joining the staff, and Assistant to the Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He was a founding member of the Art Museum Image Consortium and the Museums on the Web program committee. He has served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Alliance of Artists Communities. He has also worked as an independent curator and writer.
Drawing inspiration from a range of sources and cultures, Kamran Samimi's multimedia practice blurs the boundaries between form, matter and the immaterial. Samimi's work deals with the concepts of space, time, impermanence, and the notion of coming-into-being. Often referencing the phenomena of nature, Samimi attempts to bridge the natural world with the metaphysical via a meditative response employing simple, reductive marks and gestures. Kamran Samimi grew up in rural Laupāhoehoe on the Big Island of Hawai'i to parents of Iranian and Norwegian ancestry. He has exhibited at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, PA, Tokyo Midtown, Japan, and had solo exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Museum in United Arab Emirates, Honolulu Museum of Art, Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design, Saks 5th Avenue Waikiki, The Gallery at the University of Hawai'i, and Kahilu Theatre. Samimi holds an BFA in Printmaking and an MFA in Print Media and Sculpture from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.
If you missed the program, you can watch the recording below:
click on images for more detail
