[soft electronic music]
Tala Madani: People always come to L.A. for the stars,
and that's what we're going to do today.
How fast you can actually get to wilderness
in Los Angeles is brilliant.
And I think, you know, you have to kind of find
the things that inspire you.
Oh, look at that light.
Oh, magnificent.
[Gasps]
♪ ♪
It's so close.
The moon is very close.
♪ ♪
[Keys jingling]
It's a great studio, but...
a painting studio, what do you need?
You just need some paint, some brushes, some space.
Different paintings have different origins,
but mostly there is an idea in the very beginning.
It might not be very sort of like a verbal idea,
but it's still an idea of, like, you want this to happen,
and then you have to figure out how the image will work to
make it happen.
So I was just really interested with the idea that
there is a really recognizable face,
and there is no requirement of a nose for this face.
So I start making a lot of sketches, basically.
I started with this color, and then I sort of couldn't
make sense of the orange, so it became all black and white,
and then I think what really solved it was the idea
that they should have Hitchcock kind of shadows.
I was thinking about an ideology of the smiley
that surrounds a smiley about peace.
I started to think about him as a dogma, as a presence,
as a force,
and when their behavior was, uh, forceful,
uh, then certainly they're not that benevolent.
Something else in the show that I was really interested in
in general was light.
I think I'm also interested in the word "projector."
and then somehow, when I was working on them,
the light of the projector reminded me a lot of a kind of
religious light, and I thought it would be interesting
to think about how this religious light is now replaced
by the projector, and that's the source of the light,
is, I guess, much more controlled.
There are a lot more religious references than I've
ever had before because the smileys seem to be
like a cult, and that led to thinking about other cults.
I was really interested in the clash not the clash,
per se, but the sort of getting closer, adopting,
the adaptation of one culture by the other,
whether violently through the smiley cutting off the nose
of another guy to make him more like the smileys
or with through desire, that there is this sort of
budding pushing-closer
of the two systems.
You know, sometimes adopting another culture
can go sometimes wrong, you know?
In Los Angeles, the landscape being so open,
you're not really bombarded with a lot of things in front
of you.
And there's not a lot of hindrances to sort of, like,
plow through every day to get to your thoughts, your own
thoughts.
I was born in Tehran, Iran,
and I left Tehran at 15 and I came to Oregon.
It was culturally, uh, very informative.
Obviously I was, you know, taken out and brought somewhere
and it made me really probably, uh, what it taught me most was
how, um, Iran is perceived outside of Iran,
more than anything else, and you become aware of
well, especially somewhere like, um, rural Oregon,
you know, which is not very metropolitan.
I mean, it would have been a very different experience if I
had moved to Los Angeles,
surely, because there are just so many Iranians in L.A.
I think there is a proclivity for people to read
into the figures as from Iran.
If I was a Mexican artist, the audience would read them as
Mexican men.
Focusing on a group of men in my work
more than a kind of equilibrium
between a subject of man and woman,
it's not coming necessarily from a personal experience
of having women being segregated.
I think, for me, the reason that I started focusing on men
is because of my curiosity,
that in the same way that I'm equally interested in sort of male locker rooms in America,
it's much more speaking to my own limitations
of entering spaces...
which I then work through in my work
on some level.
Well, they're not necessarily even, uh, going to be works.
Some of them are just empty canvases, of course,
but some of them are, you know, they're beginnings of
something.
This figure was trying to fly with feathers,
and I thought that was quite a, um, that
that's just sort of still somewhere around somewhere for me.
So, you know, yeah, just keeping some things I could
lead.
In a way, they're like sketch books,
but in painted form.
For any painting
that happens, you know, you do so much and some might even
don't happen, so this is a few of them that might lead to...
might lead to little other moments, basically.
Painting is actually quite difficult.
I think that's why I'm really interested in it,
is that it's not something that comes really easily.
And in a way, I try to sort of paint them in a really loose
and easy and uncontrolled way,
so to embrace not just in the image,
but also in their painted attitude,
that level of freedom, that level of pure life, joy.
As a painter, my sense of storytelling
happens to be satirical or funny.
It certainly loosens up your unconscious
to be able to come out in ways that it couldn't otherwise.
This is a little corner I've made
for making some animations
that I'm working on at the moment.
So this is the, um,
it's a piece of wood board that's been painted
with acrylic, and then you can just make the mark,
take a picture, and erase it and then come back again.
The animation's going to be about...
two minutes, maybe two minutes and a half,
and for that, there will be about 1,700 frames.
So far, it's just a few steps
of a figure coming into the space.
This animation will have a voice.
Yeah, and it's going to be really interesting.
It's going to be the voice of God, so I have to imagine
what the voice of God will sound like.
This was the first animation where I, um, also had
a real background, a filmed background.
I--I get a very, um, naive pleasure from them.
I'm really interested in this relationship
between adults and kids,
you know, the potential
of what the kids are capable of
and what the adults are capable of.
The stories that maybe are the fundamentals
of, uh, western cultures are very much
about the kids replacing the adults,
you know, with "Oedipus Rex."
But a lot of mythologies in Iran
are actually that the parents kill the kids,
sometimes by mistake.
So, yeah, so we'll see if the kids, um...
are stronger with the adults.
The way the paintings portray the figures
as sometimes childlike or behaving badly
or not knowing who the aggressor is, and if they're liking
being victimized or being pulled at.
I think I'm much more interested in our
in our culture that looks
at those particular gestures
and finds fault in it.
For me, I think the salvation
is to behave like children.
So, in a sense, the true oppressor is the frontal lobe.
The true oppression would be, like, the controlled behavior.
The redemption is--is through this misbehavior,
and I think the--the fact that we would judge them
as sort of behaving very badly says
about level of oppression that we put on ourselves.
[soft electronic music]