Arezoo Bharthania’s evocative mixed media solo exhibition, A Home in the In-Between, is both delicate and layered. As skillfully curated by Jason Jenn at LA Art Core in Little Tokyo, the exhibition is divided into three distinct areas: hanging panels, which viewers can walk between, like scrolls that tell the story of both Bharthania’s childhood, early adulthood, and current life; similarly unfolding narrative pieces that flow from ceiling to floor, fringed at the bottom, recalling exquisite Persian rugs; and projected images exhibited in muted twilight, and viewed at least in part, through clear, etched panels. Linking each of these spaces is a section of nuanced and delicate works of wall art which resemble sections of a quilt or pieces of beautiful wallpaper.
The combination of curated spaces leads the viewer from one room to another, just as you would pass between the rooms of a home. But the home here is a dream-like one, composed of memories and plans, present reality and past sensations.
As the artist leads viewers from her recalled life in Iran to her life here in LA, her personal story reflects a broader one, a uniquely human experience of emotion and sensation, observation and understanding, envirorments both interior and external. It is the unfolding and expansion of roots and the blossoming of the future on the fertile garden of the past.
The exhibition allows the viewer time to take in the full view of her emotional, physical, and remembered home spaces. Viewers are invited not just to see but to explore Bharthania’s carefully explored territory, which she depicts through painted images, photographic depictions, and a range of tactile materials.
This is a graceful show, immersive but delicately so, shaping personal images of home, and with the artist’s projected images, a more urban and global one. What makes a home? For Bharthania is it is heart and soul, the colors of her world, from lime green to gold and pink, vibrant and personal, and moving into her images of cityscapes, a world that can be more muted and distant, a way to process, perhaps, the urban noise.
Throughout the world and throughout time, home is a place we live, we inhabit, we at least try to make in our own image – a safe refuge. It is a place in which we long for a life outside its walls and equally yearn for the succor of, or at least the hope for, sustenance that we find within them.
There is intimacy and immediacy in Bharthania’s work, and there is also a view out the windows of her metaphorical home so to speak, a look at the broader world, and the passage of time.
The artist shares beauty and wistfulness, the fragile nature of the past, the permanence of personal roots, and the restlessness of urban life, all while acknowledging the constructs of home from beyond the personal to a grander, broader, more social view.
This lovely exhibition closes Sunday, with a curatorial and artist walk through conducted by Jenn and Bharthania at 3 p.m. The gallery is open 12-4 Thursday-Sunday. LA Art Core is located at 120 Judge John Aiso St,. Los Angeles, CA 90012.
– Genie Davis, Photos: Genie Davis