4/24/2026
Happy Friday! This was such an amazing yet stressful week for me and I sincerely hope your’s has been amazing as well! I lost my pool match this week by one ball, but on the other hand the event at the Fitness Center that I was running went so well, despite the anxiety I had for it. There has been a lot going on so I have not been able to get out and shoot as much as I like, but I was still able to get some note taking in that I am super pumped to talk about as well as my thoughts on some big personal changes coming up!
Yet again I watched a School of the Visual Arts lecture from their i3 series on Youtube, this time with photographic artist Stacy Arezou Mehrfar. Mehrfar is an Iranian-American artist whose work explores how we interact with our place in space, forming identity through built and natural environments.
The first of her works I wanted to talk about is “American Palimpsets,” but we must briefly touch on her first project in and around her home in Long Island. Growing up in a much more forested area of NYC lended itself to Mehrfar developing a close relationship with nature while also exploring how this ‘contained environment’ of home was much different than the American culture she was being exposed to. For “American Palimpsets,” Mehrfar then began “taking the same questions [she] was asking about the contained environment and applying them to a national collective identity (School of Visual Arts).” This manifests itself in a nationwide project exploring the widespread suburbanization of America from 2003-2008 in the form of environmental landscapes. These photographs not only highlight the built environment of American suburbia, but set the beauty of the natural world against the artificial in an impactful way.
Delving deeper in photography and following a move to Australia, Mehrfar begins to photograph what it means to be an immigrant, or more specifically the “psychological narrative of the emotional impacts of migration (School of Visual Arts).” Comprised of everything from portraits to landscapes, to abstract black and white forestry and color blocking, “The Moon Belongs to Everyone” is an amazing amalgamation of experiments. Shooting with the cinematic ‘day for night’ technique, Mehrfar captures candid moments of everyday life in order to convert a seemingly normal instant into a memory of another place or time. A New York paper pizza plate becomes a symbol of a home left behind, a nearly solid block of yellow is reminiscent of an American school bus, and details of lunar-like surfaces remind us of a shared experience. The most impactful images for me are these intense abstract black and white stick and grass photographs uncovering the metaphysical shapes of racing thoughts.
Mehrfar used this work to help in “establishing a new identity in the strange place,” resonating a lot with me due to my recent decision to move to New Orleans in August. I will get into the details of the move some other week, but I am more scared and excited than I have ever been. I know this is going to be one of the biggest changes in my life, but like Mehrfar, I just hope to use my photography to explore the new relationships, places, and people I find myself involved with, somehow finding a new normal.
CHECK SOURCES FOR SELECTED PHOTOGRAPHS
SOURCES:
School of Visual Arts. Arezou Mehrfar, S. [SVA] (2026, April 14th). Stacy Arezou Mehrfar - Photo Based Artist [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l116z10nc8k&list=PLsvgwpCfUJcAXAwbXbEiD_AajvR3Ozxzd&index=1
Arezou Mehrfar, Stacy. 2003-2008 “Untitled” [Photograph]. https://www.stacymehrfar.com/All-Works-%7C-Homepage/American-Palimpsests/2
Arezou Mehrfar, Stacy. 2014-2020 “Untitled” [Photograph]. https://www.stacymehrfar.com/All-Works-%7C-Homepage/The-Moon-Belongs-to-Everyone-(Photographs)/25
