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Effective January 1: Masks are Optional in VisArts’ Classrooms and Studios
By Mark Jenkins
THE VIVID PAINTINGS IN HEDIEH JAVANSHIR ILCHI’S VISARTS SHOW contain her customary ingredients, but in different proportions than usual. The Tehran-born local artist has long punctuated fluid abstraction with fragments of traditional Persian motifs and snippets of Euro-American-style landscapes. That last ingredient is more prominent than ever in Tell Me How to Weave My World From These Dark Filaments, a selection of 15 mostly vertical paintings that resulted from a 2024 residency at the Rockville art complex.
Like Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, whose Seed Float mural just ended a run at the VisArts-programmed 355 Pod Space, Ilchi begins by pouring pigment. More colorful than Mann’s inky gushes, Ilchi’s swirlingly layered forms evoke clouds and oceans, but also the sort of harsh chemicals that pool with incongruous beauty. Atop the random flows, the painter adds trees and mountains and intricate filigree derived from Persian illuminated manuscripts. A few of these pictures also highlight tailed descending forms that might be shooting stars, but have bulbous heads that appear more biological than celestial.
The show places a series of smaller paintings, rendered liquidly on non-absorbent Mylar, alongside larger ones, including the gorgeous triptych “This time merciful nature saved us from ourselves.” Least expected are the pictures that are dominated by landscape, notably one in which a succession of cone-like mountains, elegantly framed by spindly silhouetted trees, suggests East Asia’s volcanic peaks. It underscores the potential of Ilchi’s paintings, in the process of building from abstraction to representation, to lead just about anywhere.
Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi: Tell Me How to Weave My World From These Dark Filaments
Through March 9 at VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. visartscenter.org. 301.315.8200.
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