Pattern (dis)Placement Soheila Esfahani

The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present Pattern (dis)Placement an exhibition by artist Soheila Esfahani.

Esfahani’s practice questions displacement, dissemination, and reinsertion of culture by re-contextualizing culturally specific ornamentation and various collected souvenir type objects. She navigates the terrains of cultural translation by exploring ornamentation as a form of “portable culture” that can be carried across cultures and nations. Pattern (dis)Placement aims to destabilize the origin of culture and reconstruct Homi Bhabha’s “the third space of in-betweenness”: a site of cultural translation, where locations of cultures are negotiated and new narratives are adapted and hybridized. In this body of work, Esfahani simultaneously emphasizes and disrupts familiar collected objects such as blue and white china in order to dissolve traditional boundaries between cultures.

As part of the exhibition, Catherine Heard’s Magic Gumball Machine of Fate at the Red Head Gallery will feature 55 coloring pages. Esfahani invites participants to color the overlaid second pattern as a way to reconstruct and disrupt the familiar blue willow pattern and to collect multiples to recreate the original image. The interaction between the Magic Gumball Machine of Fate and the participant is a symbolic act of “collecting culture”.