to bleach, to fold

About

Transmitter presents:

to bleach, to fold

Work by Zeshan Ahmed and Yasi Alipour 

On view August 6 – September 11, 2022

Opening reception: Friday, August 5, 6-8pm 

Transmitter is pleased to present to bleach, to fold, co-curated by Martha Fleming-Ives and featuring new work by Zeshan Ahmed and Yasi Alipour. 

Ahmed’s complex abstractions begin in Photoshop where he isolates the essential language of digital photography—the three distinct values of RGB, or the primary colors of light in additive synthesis. He prints red, green, and blue as solid colors on silver halide transparencies, then applies bleach in different manners and for varied increments of time. The bleach changes the tone and hue of the color printed on the transparency, at times disappearing the color completely. Together, his layered transparencies produce collages of exuberant colors and translucent marks made not through the application of color, but through its erasure.

Alipour’s tactile works on paper employ the contrary gestures of folding and unfolding. Each fold is decided upon and guided by the artist's keen interest in mathematics, particularly in how geometric principles informed the history of Islamic architecture. Working with thin black coated inkjet paper as well as in the cyanotype process, the artist’s obsessive and deliberate folds, once opened, leave a striking colorless mark—a trace created from the force of each fold. This repeated ritual transforms the otherwise flat paper surface with a three-dimensional physicality. 

About the Artists:

Zeshan Ahmed (b. 1989) was born and raised in Old Delhi, India, and is based in New York, New York. Ahmed received his MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2018, where he was awarded the Provost Scholarship. He is the recipient of the JN Tata Endowment Scholarship for the Higher Education of Indians. His work has been exhibited in New York and Pennsylvania, as well as internationally in Pingyao and Nanjing, China; Hyderabad and Mumbai, India; and Auckland, New Zealand. In 2020, he was the recipient of NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program for Visual & Multidisciplinary Artists.

Yasi Alipour (b. 1989) is an Iranian artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include 12 Gates Gallery in Philadelphia, and Bavan Gallery in Tehran, Iran. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S. at venues that include Geary Contemporary, Secca, 17 Essex, and PPOW; and internationally at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Serbia. She is a recipient of the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program Award (2019-2021), the Rema Hort Foundation Emerging Artist Nominee (2018-2019), and the Triple Canopy Publication Intensive (2018). Her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Spot Magazine, Asia Contemporary Art Week, Photograph Magazine, Volume One/Triple Canopy, and the Dear Dave. Alipour holds an MFA from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia University and SVA.