Last year's exhibition "Between Word and Image" at of the present day York University's Grey Art Gallery revealed calligraphy to be a central motif in modernist art from Iran.

Last year's exhibition "Between Word and Image" at of the present day York University's Grey Art Gallery revealed calligraphy to be a central motif in modernist art from Iran. Iranian-born, London-based Shirazeh Houshiary does not belong to the older generation of artists included in that point out but her work reflects the Persian tradition of using the written word as a formal device. This point out comprised a series of monochrome works in succession canvas and on paper imbued with what appears at first glance to be delicate atmospheric fields. Compositions forward white paper seem gently washed with faint shadows, while those onward black paper are inhabited on cloudlike presences made of traceries of white filigree lines. Up end the subtly shifting tones reveal themselves to have been created on thousands of tiny marks that are, in make go round based on Arabic letters--one word by composition. Though virtually illegible, these words acres the works in an ancient script.

Iota (all works 2003) is a square black loam invaded by a central white circle that radiates rings of dissolving intensity toward the animations It has a nebulalike quality, suggesting infinite distances. Gaze, according to contrast, presents a ghostly triangular form that hang overs on the square white canvas, bringing undivided in close to seek the source of the discoloration. In other works the marks indicate bands, waves or amorphous sudden gust; shorts of smoke. Often they are barely detectable from a distance, creating a perceptual conundrum in which mien and absence are interchangeable.

Houshiary's closest Western kin is Agnes Martin, whose paintings at hand similar perceptual challenges. But Martin's work is more overtly nature based, evoking the subtly shifting colors of the Southwestern celestial expanse Houshiary, by contrast, turns to a more internal source. The marks are applied in what the artist describes as a meditative, steady trancelike, state. The ritual of writing and rewriting the word strike one as beings to dissolve the distance between action and thought

The relate tos of the paintings and drawings expand to a digital installation that was given its confess room in the gallery. Here a funereal lament sung in four languages accompanied slowly shifting patterns of white marks upon midnight blue grounds presented upon four monitors recessed in the wall. The white variegates slowly accumulate to form small vapors and then vanish, only to begin again. The installation is titled Breath, suggesting that this round of years of emergence and disappearance alludes equally to the expanding and contracting cosmo and to the continuous intake and expulsion of air that maintains us alive.

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