Exhibitions

Babak Golkar
Grounds for Standing and Understanding

January 18 to February 26, 2012

Exhibition curated by Greg Bellerby
Opening Reception: Tuesday January 17, 2012 at 7:30pm

The Charles H. Scott Gallery is pleased to present Grounds for Standing and Understanding, a solo exhibition by Vancouver artist Babak Golkar. Golkar’s site-specific installation is made up of two major components that work together to investigate complex relationships between perception, space, architecture and culture.

Using Persian carpets as a foundation, Golkar literally “draws up” design elements from the intricate patterns and transforms them into three-dimensional scale models that resemble architectural mega-towers. Buildings recently constructed in the Middle East, and elsewhere, such as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (the world’s tallest building) may come to mind. These architectural miniatures play off the representations of space found in the traditional iconography of the carpets, which would reference specific geographies in their patterning.

Golkar has altered the gallery by building walls that divide the space into patterns based on those of the Persian carpet. The miniature structures are expanded so that the viewer may walk within them. The lines between past and future, interior and exterior, architecture and object blur as scale shifts and two-dimensional patterns translate into three-dimensional objects while engaging with the evolving representation of a culture through ideas of the historical carpet and the futuristic city.

Babak Golkar received a BFA from Emily Carr University and an MFA from the University of British Columbia. He has exhibited in Vienna, Kuwait, Berlin and London. Most recently he has shown at the Sanatorium Project in Istanbul, Turkey and at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Babak Golkar, Negotiating Space, 2012. Dimensions variable, Persian carpet, wood, acrylic, paint.