When Talepasand visited Iran, her work changed. She was 24, and getting ready to start her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. While she was in Iran, she apprenticed under a traditional miniature painter for a period that was supposed to be three months. After three days, he felt that he had taught her everything she needed to know. “He would make me copy miniatures, and I would copy them, but I would mess with the scene, with the idea.” Here, Talepasand developed an admiration for traditional Qajar dynasty miniature paintings, scenes of men and women in
embrace, bare breasted, and eroticized. These paintings have been censored by passing regimes; their sexuality covered up, scratched off, or scraped away. Talepasand was determined to bring these violated works back to life, albeit on her own terms. She copied these scenes with subverted precision, using the traditional and tedious methods of egg tempera. A woman’s reflection in the
mirror appears male; a bottle of whiskey replaces a bottle of wine. And, in recent work, a red chador, which normally conceals the female body, exposes the thighs and underwear of Talepasand herself, who sits with her legs spread to the viewer. “I realized I look it, I speak it, I am it—I have to make work on it.”
Though this practice came easy while she was in Iran, coming back to the US proved diffi cult in this regard. “I didn’t want to pull my Iranian card,” she explains. “I wanted to be honest about it.” It was her delve into self-portraiture that allowed her to embrace this change in her work—she could speak personally, not generally, about cultural divides and stigmas, the cosmopolitan and traditional aspects of her experience, and play with herself the same way she had been playing with other imagery. “When I am drawing, I know that I am drawing myself, but I get carried away sometimes, and maybe fantasize about the way I look to others.” By re-positioning herself into these scenes, repainting them, and playing with their symbolism, she is again staging a “double-life” for these censored works, which mirrors her own.
And the blunts? In her most recent trip to Iran last summer, she collected a stack of currency which depicts the late Muslim cleric and political leader Ayatollah Khomeini. “It’s against the law to cut up money anywhere in the world; it’s super against the law to cut up money with the Ayatollah Khomeini on it.” She intends to roll these into blunts proper and somehow get them to a 2008 exhibition in New York without being arrested.
Though she loves how her combination of imagery tests the limits of cultural comfort, the rebellion against tradition is ultimately not her goal. “First of all, these poses are very old—they’ve already happened. I am doing something that’s already been painted. It’s not necessarily a flip-off to Iran or a flip-off to America.” Instead, it’s a matter of exposure: loosening the threat of imagery, and perhaps subsequently, the threat of cultural difference.