Amir H. Fallah

In Amir H. Fallah’s lat­est body of work, he con­tin­ues his prior explo­rations into boy­hood mem­ory, the inten­sity of rela­tion­ships, both past and present, and the thin line between the real and the imagined.

In Amir H. Fallah’s lat­est body of work, he con­tin­ues his prior explo­rations into boy­hood mem­ory, the inten­sity of rela­tion­ships, both past and present, and the thin line between the real and the imagined.

Fallah’s ongo­ing series titled I Put You on a Pedestal, includes prickly cacti (used as sym­bolic replace­ments for peo­ple), con­tained and cared for in col­or­ful pots, pep­per the works, rest­ing on pre­car­i­ously con­structed tow­ers of found objects. Sou­venirs, knick-knacks, fig­ures, and trin­kets gather in the makeshift dis­plays. Set within dream­like gradient-laden voids, washes of intense col­ors elude notions of time and place, and can be seen in Fallah’s acid sun­sets, or sun­rises, which defy speci­ficity, all at once pre­his­toric, unearthly, and futuristic.

Each paint­ing loosely weaves nar­ra­tive threads together, col­lected from Fallah’s per­sonal expe­ri­ences, art his­tory, pop cul­ture, or invented rec­ol­lec­tions. The multi-tiered fort lev­els, like vignettes within a mem­oir, func­tion like chap­ters in the painting’s over­ar­ch­ing story. Fig­u­ra­tive col­lage ele­ments are also intro­duced, work­ing as tex­tures and imagery, both pho­to­graphic and painted, cre­at­ing bound­aries between authen­tic­ity and arti­fice, orig­i­nal and copy.

Within this lat­est body of work, Fallah’s dis­tinc­tive sense of humor is now fore­grounded: a sense of reverie and ironic cel­e­bra­tion of life’s occa­sion­ally irra­tional and erratic nature is appar­ent. In The Ulti­mate Mom Paint­ing, Fal­lah con­structs a clas­sic still life of flow­ers where he has turned the tra­di­tional sym­bols of human emo­tion into a lov­ing jab at his mother’s expec­ta­tions of him as an indi­vid­ual in soci­ety, and as an artist. Fallah’s works can be seen as play­fully con­structed metaphors for the ways in which we pre­car­i­ously assem­ble mean­ing and mem­ory, mon­u­ment and truth—which, like his forts, are always tee­ter­ing on the verge of glory, or collapse.