Ancient Blue Ornament

Kamrooz Aram

January 11 – April 1

Atlanta Contemporary

535 Means St NW Atlanta, Georgia

Kamrooz Aram utilizes painting, sculpture, and photography to examine the intersections between ornamental art, which has often been deemed “minor” throughout Western art history, and Modernism with its great phobia of the ornamental. His painterly works transcend the specter of the decorative, blending patterns derived from Persian carpets with geometric patterns common in vernacular modern European architecture.

Aram challenges the viewer to consider the exhibition space as an architectural whole. Using exhibition design as a unifying form, he dismantles the hierarchy between the objects on display, the mechanisms of display such as pedestals, and the architecture of the museum itself. An antique carpet might be displayed along with genuine antiquities, replica ceramics found in a museum gift shop, or objects the artist has designed or made himself, in order to question the way that we assign value to such objects. Aram challenges what he refers to as the false neutrality of the museum. Whether we are engaging art in an encyclopedic museum with linen-lined vitrines, or a white-cube contemporary art space such as this one, we are never viewing art objects in a neutral space. Every aspect, including architectural details, informs the way that we perceive the objects on display.

Find out more about the exhibition here and more about Aram here and here.