As an artist who has lived and worked on several continents, I rely on
my world view to inform my inner mind. Living in Los Angeles, one of
the most iconoclastic cities of all, inspires me to draw upon my self-training and motivation to constantly produce unique, personal artworks. My conceptual pieces are a mixture of found objects and paint in a
three dimensional format, directly communicating my thoughts and representing my life. I invite you to look at the world through my eyes.
Farzad Kohan’s sculptures are characterized by gracefully bending figures, moving through space on a fluid journey.
The rough-hewn shapes, braided from a mixture of clay and wood chips laid over a wire frame, clearly represent our human core, free of gender, race, culture or anything else that we use to judge one another. Even the pieces that contain more than one figure exude a palpable sense of loneliness; no one touches, not even the aloof mother and child in “What Have We Done to Our Children?”
While his older works like “The System”—which traces a symbolic path through the many man-made rules and societal pressures a person faces in their lifetime, feature open-air compositions, his more recent pieces present restricted spaces populated by those same expressive beings. Ironically, by confining his dramas to black painted boxes, like a theatrical set designer’s diorama, Kohan has freed his characters. By making quite literal the “boxes” we put ourselves into, he allows the figures to transcend those limitations. In “Searching,” the solitary entity perches on top of his cage, arms outstretched. He may still be alone, but he is free.
Of this new stage in his art, Kohan comments, “What I’m trying to say now is that we place these regulations on ourselves without thinking twice. At the same time as they separate us from one another, they bind us together, so there’s an ambiguity to stripping away those exterior trappings. In the end, all we really have in common is our limited time on this planet. All we can control is how we spend that time. Will we separate ourselves, or will we seek out the common ground?”