Cris Worley Fine Arts is proud to present Blood Shot is Blood Loved, our second solo exhibition with Simeen Farhat, opening with an artist’s reception on Saturday, April 1st, from 5 to 8 p.m. Blood Shot is Blood Loved will include a large-scale installation along with various multi-dimensional wall reliefs. The exhibition will be on view through May 6, 2017.
In her work, Farhat often uses cast resin and acrylic to make intimately poetic sculptures that engage participants in the act of deciphering between material form and shadow, much like the process of deriving meaning from sensory perception; a visual analogue to the brutally nuanced struggle of human communication.
Inspiration for Blood Shot is Blood Loved began with Farhat’s poetic meditations on the dual nature of one of the most vital elements in the natural world—blood. As the artist writes, “I leave my traces many times. I can be either hot or cold. People both love and hate me—I scare them off; but they need me, too. My name is Blood.” In this installation, Farhat re-creates the moment a large-scale drop of blood hits ground, capturing the reverberating effects released by a passionate burst of energy. The ardent drop of blood is assembled from abstracted epigraphic forms, a signature of Farhat’s body of work. The direct metaphor with the liquid materiality of the human body evokes a realm of ideas inhabited by her previous works: A Teardrop in Disperse (2015), A Bubble Bursts (2015), and A Red Drop of Blood (2015). By rendering one example of the un-deniability of the human body, Blood Shot is Blood Loved quietly implicates the dichotomy between purity of life, and abject realities of violence that suppress human volition, globally. Mimicking the quality of blood as a provocative substance, the installation invites the viewer to actively explore the blood droplet as it spills into the gallery space.
Simeen Farhat was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She has lived and worked in the U.S. since 1992, receiving her BFA from Arizona State University, and her MFA from Texas Christian University. Her work has been exhibited worldwide in Austria, France, Germany, India, Singapore, Taiwan, the UK, at the National Art Gallery in Pakistan, and the Sharjah Museum of Modern Art, among others. Farhat participated in the 2009 Texas Biennial; in 2012 she was an Artist in Residence at the ORYX Foundation in Switzerland; and in 2015 she was invited to participate in an exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale, In the Eye of the Thunderstorm: Effervescent Practices from the Arab World. Farhat’s work is represented in the Crown Prince of UAE’s Abu Dhabi Palace Collection, The U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, The Four Seasons Hotel in Dubai, and the Peninsula Hotel in Paris.

OPENING RECEPTION : Saturday, April 1 from 5 - 8pm

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