| 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. |  |
The Third Line
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.
