Nazafarin Lotfi
Vanishing Point
June 8 – July 20, 2024
Opening reception: Saturday, June 8, 2:00-5:00 PM

“Ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer contained or repressed or blocked from view. In other words, haunting is a way we’re notified that what’s been suppressed or concealed is very much alive and present, interfering with us and with the systems of repression that produce concealment and blockage.”

—Avery Gordon, Haunting and Thinking from the Utopian Margins: Conversation with Avery Gordon

Vanishing Point explores encountering absent subjects and interacting with the exteriority of what is established as the other. Giving up verticality, the sculptures on the floor throughout the exhibition evoke bodies (human and non-human), addressing the politics of horizontality (ground) in relation to dehumanization, invisibility, and incompleteness. They are places of bodies departed, containers empty of content, that privilege the ground honoring those denied of it. The lying figures invite the viewing bodies to extend beyond their boundaries and project themselves out onto them in an act of making, as if in a counter-world.

The textured surfaces of the sculptures expand throughout space within the wall pieces, offering scopic views of areas zoomed in or zoomed out. Folded and draped over the wood panels, the surfaces materialize a multi-dimensional relationship between the image and the support, rejecting the figure ground division.

The works are not merely concerned with what appears and how it appears from the horizon line; what is present (materialized) is as much active as what is absent (immaterial), both equally participating in the making. The dynamic interaction between what is there and what is not emphasizes absence and emptiness as generative spaces. Vanishing point is about existence and non-existence, the irony of negating life at the very point that actualizes the possibility of bringing new worlds to life.

– text by Nazafarin Lotfi

Regards presents Vanishing Point, an exhibition of new sculptures by Nazafarin Lotfi. Born and raised in Iran, Lotfi moved to Chicago in 2009 to earn an MFA from SAIC. This is her fourth time exhibiting at Regards. Lotfi has also exhibited at Artpace San Antonio; Illinois State University Galleries; MoCA Tuscon; Tuscon Museum of Art, Arizona; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; Soon.tw, Montreal; Elmhurst Museum of Art, Illinois; and Ditch Projects, Oregon among others. In 2022, Lotfi founded the Hamrah Arts Club in Tuscon as a creative community and safe space to improve the lives of refugee-status youth. A short documentary about Lotfi’s work as an artist and founder of Hamrah Arts club can be viewed here.

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