Opening reception: Tuesday, July 23, 2024, 4-6 pm
Inner Compulsion emerged from the idea of duration, repetition, and the relationship between body, time, and labor. These elements are embodied in black and red hand embroidery stitches on muslin fabric. The pieces are fictional autobiographies, constructing a visual narrative over a seven-year period, revealing an ongoing continuum. Through slow, deliberate marks, they disclose intimate tensions and psychological states, stemming from an inner force to understand the self in relation to everyday experiences. These works are methods of tracking one's being over a limited period, with repetition within the series capturing paused moments of transformation, fueled by memories, stories, and past events, reinforced by the present. This process is a highly intuitive study, creating slow drawings that serve as a visual record of time, reflecting history and its passage.
The artist will also be working with the K-12 teachers in our 2024 Innovative Educators Institute, Flourishing.
This is a HOME event.
About the Artist
Elnaz Javani is an Iranian artist and educator currently residing in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she is an assistant professor and head of Fibers at Colorado State University. She works between the media of textiles, drawing, print, and installations. Her practice revolves around the fragmentation of identity and place, power dynamics and labor. Through material manipulation, layering, stitching and dyeing processes, she tries to construct a personal, fictional, and imaginary space of existence. She holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was the recipient of the New Artist Society Merit Scholarship, and she received a BFA from Tehran University of Art. Javani is a recipient of the New Voices 2024 at Print Center New York, a 2023 Center for Craft Artist Cohort Grant Recipient, and she was awarded Faculty Enrichment Grants from SAIC for 2022 and 2021. She was named one of Chicago's Break Out Artists of the year for 2022, and she has received a Spark Grant from Chicago Artist Coalition (2021), the Kala Art Institute Fellowship Award and Residency Grant (2020), the Define American Art Fellowship Grant (2020), and the Hyde Park Art Center Flex Space Residency Award (2019). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally in the USA, Spain, Iran, France, Colombia, Turkey, UAE, Germany, Canada, and Switzerland.
