July 30th – August 28th, 2015

Artists Involved:
Bijan Ramezani

Download Exhibition Essay

The Elusivity of Identity focuses on the complexities of western media representation, especially my own dual Iranian-Canadian identity within the constrains of a post 9/11 western world. The appropriation of various media types such as images from Google, National Geographic, daily newspapers, social media sites, and other popular digital forms of mass media are paired with the family and personal archive of images, working with the gaze between fiction, reality and current narratives while analyzing the process of looking for my own identity and culture through the perspective of others.

Recycling and re-positioning current institutionalized images and narratives while putting them back within an institutionalized arena of post modern discourse, creating a portal to a new dimension. An advertisement to enter the institution, the gateway to culture. Identity has become elusive within the eyes of mass media, our sensibilities dulled by spectacles and repetitions, a non event to replace the familiar. Using the found narratives that exist within the institutionalized portrayal of the real, I am showing the image as it stands, raw and uncut. It is hard to escape from that which you cannot escape from. As hard as you try it’s impossible to grasp. It is what it is.

Has the real become more meaningful in its absence? Coming soon.

-Bijan Ramezani

*Image source: National Post, AFP/ STR, Nov. 4, 2013