Hadieh Shafie: Beautiful Words

Internationally recognized Iranian American artist Hadieh Shafie has, over the past decade and a half, systematically explored the physical qualities of writing and the traces it leaves behind. Text is now so deeply embedded in daily life that we take it for granted, but Shafie draws our focused attention to it through overload, hide-and-seek, and shapeshifting. She also pushes—hard—on the question, ‘What constitutes writing?’ Her art reveals the multifaceted materiality of text. This installation is Shafie’s first solo project in the United States and her first one-person museum exhibition. It showcases one of the most recent developments in the artist’s studio practice, which she calls “vertical books.” The planar rolled paper objects, for which she is well known, now fully inhabit dimensional space; the coils have grown in size and length. In clusters, they hang from the ceiling or seem to emerge from the floor. The respective silhouettes of each suspended strand fluctuate from wide to narrow. All the text-based objects that Shafie creates—flat sheets, planar rolls, tapered extensions, dangling bunches—imply potential relationships: words arise from the desire to communicate; books exist for future readers. Beautiful Words awaits future viewers to experience books in the expanded field, where, according to the artist, “words are an energetic charge, color is emotion, and repetition is a kind of spiritual practice.”

‘Beautiful Words’ Gallery Guide

Made possible in part by support from: