Viewing Program artist Seher Shah’s architectural drawings are both fantastical and factual. Her drawings are complicated studies of real architectural spaces with multiple perspectival renderings of the structures. On a recent studio visit we talked about her influences and thoughts on the failed idealism of particular Modernist buildings.

 

Seher mentioned that her drawings use external references in combination with internal, more emotive systems of representation.  In order to better understand the internal/external play in her drawings I proposed that we investigate this idea in her recent work, Object Repetition, recently installed at the Jones Center in Austin, Texas. Object Repetition is a new direction for Seher.

 

It is composed of identically reductive geometric forms, which reference both buildings and monuments. The work feels like a three dimensional drawing. I wanted to get at the aspects of her work which are difficult to communicate, her associations with emotions and time. We loosely worked out a sequence of images that would provide a flexible interpretation of Seher’s work and perhaps reveal the internal object anxiety that interests her.

 

Below is a series of images of both the finished work and Seher’s conceptual source material, which offers a vantage into its intuitive and textural nuances.

 

 –Lisa Sigal, Viewing Program Curator