Arghavan Khosravi is the youngest artist featured in issue #2, but her grasp of art history, and her will to activate it within her practice, is no less thoughtful than the others. An MFA Painting student at RISD, I found this work, Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, in her class’s current exhibition at Morgan Lehman. The show was strong, but this particular work, I dare say, was the strongest.
Fath-Ali Shah Qajar is part of a larger series that the artist has undertaken to appropriate and subvert the most ubiquitous portrait in the United States: that of George Washington on the one dollar bill. Moreover, Khosravi couples this desire with her careful study of the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal traditions of miniatures, and more generally, Persian portraiture.
We find here a crisp one dollar bill that Khosravi has surgically dissected. A seal mid-right is overpainted in a decorative motif. One of the “1”s has been replaced with beautiful calligraphic script (Persian calligraphy, in fact, that spells out the Shah’s name). And in lieu of America’s first president we find Fath-Ali Shah Qajar himself, the second Shah of Iran who ruled from 1797 to 1834. Though forty years separated the men, their ascents to power occurred only a few years apart.