Statement:

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce Sequence 9: one work, one or two weeks, an exhibition wherein, over the course of six weeks, a single artwork will be on view at our 36 Orchard Street space for the duration of one or two weeks. This sequencing of objects by various artists articulated over time constitutes a break from the traditional group show in which works are relationally installed in space rather than time.

This ninth iteration of the exhibition begins with a suite of drawings from 2008 by Raha Raissnia. The next artist’s work will be announced on the day preceding its unveiling.

Raha Raissnia’s films, drawings, and paintings are closely imbricated: paintings are contrapuntal compositions catalyzed by film stills, transferred faintly onto the surface of the panel and elaborated upon with oil and gesso. Her films echo this archaeological process, constructed from fragments of earlier work and structured as overlapping pairs of 35mm slide and 16mm film projections. Raissnia’s drawings and collages, likewise comprised of image transfers, with Sumi ink and graphite, examine this relationship of mutual influence. All are guided by the materiality of their media.

While Raissnia’s film works extend time, her drawings on paper seem to define and encapsulate it. Her densely textured work draws in equal measure on the gestural and photographic, the figurative and abstract. As her films render these boundaries ambiguous through layers of manipulation and reference, so too does her two-dimensional work present a world that contains aspects of both but belongs properly to neither.

It features passageways to indeterminate locations and irrational architectures. “My paintings brought abstraction to the vision I captured from the world on film, and now the films are bringing elements of reality into my paintings,” Raissnia says. Her viewer is left with the (impossible) task of excavating the two.