The Jade presents recent paintings by Laleh Motlagh, centering on a jade plant brought by her father from her hometown of Tabriz, Iran, in 2012. Over fourteen years of relocation across various Chicago homes and studios, Motlagh has nurtured this plant, developing an intimate, symbiotic bond with it. Since 2022, the jade has transitioned from a personal companion into one of the primary subjects of her visual practice.

Indigenous to South Africa but ubiquitous worldwide, the plant serves as a living metaphor for political displacement and global migration. Motlagh focuses intently on the plant’s pot as a site of dual identity: it is both a protective shelter and a rigid constraint. Confined within this human-made structure, the jade adaptation mirrors the endurance of Iranian women navigating systemic restriction and control. Through daily and repetitive observation, The Jade maps the deep intimacy between human and botanical life, offering a quiet meditation on uprooting, survival, and the persistent will to grow within boundaries.

Laleh Motlagh is an Iranian-Azerbaijani American artist whose practice investigates geopolitical and environmental landscapes through lived experience, prolonged observation, and care as a critical method of inquiry. Drawing from personal and inherited histories, her work explores the tensions between resilience and fragility, spiritual intimacy, and systemic control. Motlagh collects, examines, and informally archives materials from the peripheries of daily life, transforming them into carriers of suppressed histories and neglected ecologies. Working across drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, video, and installation, she questions the boundaries between human and botanical life, the admissible and the taboo, and the socio-political realities embedded within discourses of border zones, migration, and belonging.

Laleh Motlagh لاله مطلق (b. Tabriz, Iran) is a Chicago-based artist and educator. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as Driehaus Museum (Chicago, USA), Museo Universitario del Chopo (Mexico City, Mexico), EXPO (Chicago, USA), Logan Center for the Arts (Chicago, USA), Chicago Artist Coalition (Chicago, USA), KHB Studios (Berlin, Germany), NAHR (Sotechiesta, Italy), Teufelsberg (Berlin, Germany), Gallery 400 (Chicago, USA), Sarv Gallery (Tehran, Iran), Farhang Gallery (Tabriz, Iran) among others. She has received multiple awards and recognitions, including Individual Artists Program grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Newcity’s Breakout Artist, U.S. Fulbright Independent Artist Research grant, Provost’s Award for Graduate Research, and more. Motlagh received her MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago.

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Tags: Epiphany Center for the Arts, Laleh Motlagh, near west side, The Jade