Rolling blunts with Iranian currency, appropriating coveted Iranian paintings with tattoos and bottles of whiskey, and turning the chador into a sexy, sensuously revealing cloth, San Francisco-based artist Taravat Talepasand loves to play.
Taravat means “freshness” in Arabic. By mixing and refreshing cultural stereotypes and signifiers, Talepasand works with what she calls her “double life,” playing with her position as a dual citizen: somewhere between Iran and the US, between the traditional and the contemporary aspects of both,and at times, between being an object of desire and an object of political paranoia.
Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Taravat Talepasand’s cultural duality began as early as the year she was born—1979. “That was the year of the Iranian revolution,” she says. “And that, in some ways, is the basis for all my work.”
Portland is a far cry from Tehran. But in her teenage years, Talepasand wasn’t making work about her position; she was living it. Her neighborhood was predominantly white with a suburban aesthetic, though there was an Iranian community that was strong and ever present. She snuck out, drank, skateboarded, played piano, and then came home to speak Farsi and eat Persian food with her family. “Don’t get me wrong—we ate hot dogs and hamburgers on the weekends, we had barbecues,” Talepasand assures, “but we ate most meals on the floor on a sofreh, even though we had a beautiful dining room table in the next room.”
Talepasand began her art career in earnest at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she started in architecture, switched to fashion, and finally, settled into an illustration major. It was through the rigorous technical training in the illustration program where Talepasand began to develop her aesthetic. Playing with the lines between perception and identity, Talepasand had begun the exercise of taking iconic and symbolic imagery and subverting it, flipping it on its head, making it crude, distasteful, taboo, and sexual.
“I took illustration classes, which I pretty much always failed. For example, an assignment might be to take a character from pop culture that everyone would recognize, and change it, flip it around.” However, when she showed up to class with “an impeccably painted Sesame Street Gang, all the characters portrayed accurately, except that Bert and Ernie were fucking each other in the ass,” that was not what they had in mind. “I had my own way of depicting things,” she says with a coy smile. “I wanted to work on my own terms.”