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New work by a DU art professor features a giant sand pit containing 33 cubic feet of black sand dominates a huge square on the ground with a plotting machine overhead.
A visitor to the new exhibition would be confronted by the a small, brass pendulum held up with a thin string above the sand drawing a pattern. This is the work of Laleh Mehran, an associate professor in the school of Art and Art History. It is part of a series called “Ways of Knowing,” housed at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs Gallery of Contemporary Art. The show opens this Friday.
Mehran is originally from Iran. She relocated to the United States in 1978 when she was around 9 years old during the Iranian Revolution. She moved to Denver five years ago to work at DU. Mehran teaches time-based media, ranging from video to installation to performance, in the eMAD program.
The majority of Mehran’s work is “time-based,” meaning it is interactive, requiring a duration of time to fully experience the art.
“The average time spent looking at a painting in a museum is four seconds,” said Merhan. Her work does not allow the audience to leave so quickly. “With my work, if you don’t spend time, you’ll miss a critical component.”
She loves to explore new technology and material through her work. Instead of choosing one medium, she uses her art as a process to learn and experience.
“I like to take on new and intensely ambitious work,” said Merhan. “New media, which is my field, is all about the emergent, what the next thing is.”
Exploring and inventing is exactly what Mehran and her right-hand man, Chris Coleman, also a professor in the eMad program, have done for her most recent installation. Coleman invented many elements of this enlarged sand-plotter, fabricating parts on the fly.
When beginning the project, Mehran knew she wanted to use sand, a mechanical element and the basic concept of the purity of ideas.
The concept behind her piece pertains to ideas as patterns, which the sand-plotter creates in the black sand. As these patterns or ideas are spread, they shift from their original perfection.
Essentially, the idea manifests itself as a perfect pattern, but as the idea spreads, it loses its perfection and becomes something entirely different. When people walk around the sand-plotter, they affect the movement of the pendulum, changing its pattern of perfection just as ideas are changed.
Mehran said her piece is specifically a critique of politics and religion.
“I think [politics and religion] have lost their purity. Whatever fabulous ideas they were, they’ve been completely manipulated into something else,” she said.
Though she respects the ideologies of politics and religion, Mehran believes they have been too changed from their original forms.
“What I find intensely problematic is how they can be used to isolate and create intense hatred, and in some ways really be used as vehicles to propel personal agendas, rather than the original perfect ideas, which were about a peaceful and democratic way of navigating the world,” said Mehran.
Mehran’s work is all about learning, invention and truly experiencing the work – just as one will truly experience the changing of ideas as they walk around her field of black sand, watching the pendulum plot perfect idea after perfect idea, warped by the presence of people.
