Statement: 

Dio Horia Gallery is pleased to present "A Natural Selection", the first cohesive presentation of Amir H. Fallah's exploration of a new medium: stained glass. In the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, A Natural Selection explores themes of nature, belonging, the environment, and man’s role in destroying, living in, and attempting to preserve the natural world for future generations. Fallah brings the glass medium into the 21st century by combining traditional and contemporary methods of glass production through the use of both fused and stained glass. Working in experimental techniques like using a CNC router to intricately cut the glass, and using sandblasting to create varied patterns and textures onto the surface, Fallah blends the old and new as a metaphor of learning what the past has taught us, and our desire to re-imagine it for a more hopeful future.His stained glass works are illuminated internally through the use of an LED backing, speaking to the convergence of the natural and manmade. ///

This lighting technique removes the dependence for natural light, allowing the pieces to glow from within. Each of the four glass-stained works in the exhibition uses gathered, archival source material as its foundation.This imagery references contemporary painting, ’60s abstraction, Islamic art, vintage illustration, early computer graphics, and Persian miniatures. Compositionally, the works are built on a hierarchical format using the rules of Photoshop, wherein grids are utilized as style guides for the user. The grids themselves are not shown in the final works, but help create the overall composition and show the hierarchy of bitmapped and halftoned images. At times, these structural rules are broken to foster an added tension by layering and overlapping brightly colored textures and patterns with various iconographies of high and low culture. The global pandemic has shifted the perception of time for many, and this slowness has allowed a renewed discovery and connection to nature. The slowing down of our lives has freed up time for us to become more aware of the quiet, the delicate, the fragile, and the rare. At times this could mean an awareness of a small creature, and at other times an valuable antiquity or archeological relic that tells us about the origins of man. These are all fragments of humanity’s story, and clues to where we should be heading. ‘A Natural Selection’ investigates our connection with, and disconnection from, the natural world, in hopes of finding a new path forward.