Maysha Mohamedi: Mute Counsel

Maysha Mohamedi is a collector: thrift-store magazines, broken sea glass, travelor’s dictionaries, old children’s toys. She keeps photographs and prints as color palettes, and swatches paint— shipped in from Iran or handmixed in her studio— onto images of vintage dining rooms, closeup shots of floral bouquets, and pages from 1970’s lifestyle magazines. She transports the colors, natural contours, and smells of a place and stores them inside her paintings, where they become again reanimated. Inside the collection “Mute Counsel”, abstract forms swim inside huge white backdrops: jagged islands of color in stamp-like repetition, thin causeways made by split thread lines. Some forms are mirrored, in conversation, while others you can image fitting like jigsaw pieces into each other. The shapes don’t discernably resemble letters— or the Farsi characters in some of Mohamedi’s previous works— but they perform in a similar puzzle-like play.

Even as Mohamedi carries out the interview in an easy-going California chatter, she talks extensively about her frustration with language. The LA based artist has always struggled to convey herself, not just because English is not her first language, but because she has never been satisfied with what words alone can express. Her paintings are an attempt to break through the barriers of language, dialect, and habituation, and to convey a mood or feeling from the most abstract perspective. Mohamedi shares about her creative process, which bears traces of her former lab training as a student of neuroscience, and about how she has found a way to embody complex emotions in visual forms. “Mute Counsel” will be displayed at Pace Gallery in Berlin, running from the beginning of Berlin Gallery Weekend until June 26th.

SLEEK: Your artworks have an effect of synesthesia— words related to calligraphic shapes, related to colors. How do you get from one to the other, and how does your new exhibition correspond to the name “Mute Counsel”?

Maysha Mohamedi: One of my original motivating impulses in wanting to express myself in a painting was to try to talk about something that was difficult for me to express in language. Something that was bothering me or had some deep impact on me, or some kind of euphoric experience.

Before I developed this language that’s idiosyncratic to me, with the shapes and the lines, I didn’t know what that looked like. I collect a lot from thrift stores and vintage materials like printed matter and I found this shorthand dictionary from the 1950s. I was really struck by the fact that you could look up any word and that it’s possible to express a very concise idea in a form that is not reflected in letters that we recognize.

So I started to use those. If I had some idea or concept that I wanted to express, I would reduce it down to one phrase and then use the various dictionaries and books I had to translate it. I would write out the translation and try to recognize if those dashes and lines and marks resonated with the sentiment I was trying to get across. It was really like a series of experiments. And then, every now and then I would write a word in the symbols and it would actually feel like the thing I was trying to say. 

S: Do you see your paintings completed before you finish them, or is the process more
spontaneous?

MM: After I used those source materials to develop my embodied attraction toward what was meaningful, I was able to drop those things. I started to recognize within myself when a certain line that I dragged on the canvas felt like sorrow, felt like joy, felt like loneliness. There is that computation going on, in my heart and mind, that this looks like the thing I want to say. And when it doesn’t, I do cover them. I have such a keen sense for what form resonates with my emotion that if it does go off track, I can tell right away.

S: So do you have a clear understanding of what each shape is, like a code?

MM: I don’t think each particular form says one thing, but I combine them and recombine them with each other. They spell out different meanings for me in an emotionally resonant way, not like an actual word. 

But I really try not to lock in too heavily to a specific meaning because I want them to function on a variety of surfaces. If I lock too heavily into a specific meaning, it closes down your entry point as the viewer. And obviously these paintings are not for me, they’re for other people to look at. So I need to find ways formally to keep the entry point wide open. 

S: You work a lot with your hands, and even collect some of your own painting materials.
How does this level of intimacy with your materials affect the process of your painting?

MM: I do think prioritizing my personal touch on the surface is important. I think that the more personal I can make the process and the more idiosyncratic to my sensibilities, the more the viewer feels it. It might not be true, but I have to believe that me touching the canvas using a custom made tool, custom made paint, is bringing something more personal than stuff I bought at the art store. 

I feel like my motivating impulse toward finding and discovering these unorthodox materials is really a quest to understand myself. I’ve always sought to find myself in the world, because it’s always been difficult for me to invent the language to articulate how I feel. Maybe because English was not my first language. One way I found to experience that sense of peace, that I belong in this world, is to recognize objects and sensations in my environment and collect them for myself. 

S: Why did you shift from neuroscience studies to pursue art? And how has the prior work fed into this new choice?

MM: I need to have a sense of discovery and thrill in my process: going out into the world with zero expectation, going to thrift stores, collecting things, walking on the beach with my kids, discovering tar on the beach. Considering “what if I put that in a painting?”. There’s something really exciting about that. Recombining the elements of my daily experience into something like this.

S: If you draw inspiration from words, script, and songs, just as much your paintings are in
reference to the objects and surroundings of your life in California. How rooted are these references in your childhood and growing up in this very unique city? Do you feel that your artwork changes as you travel somewhere new?

MM: A lot of people think I’m concerned with memory because I tell so many stories around my work. But it is much more about being in the moment and harnessing these rich emotions. 

I do think my place affects me deeply. I have two studios. One is downtown LA and it’s very brightly lit, it’s basically all windows. It’s kind of your quintessential Los Angeles space, in this old historic building and overlooking the downtown skyline. And then I have another studio that’s closer to my home, and there’s no windows. It’s in a business park, and it’s kind of more in a natural area that’s closer to the ocean. 

I definitely have a different way of working in each space. Even being here in Berlin, for example, I collect colors and sensations, even if it’s not in a photograph. I remember kind of the quality of color interaction or even just how I felt. I will definitely be making a painting about this experience.

S: What would your experience in Berlin so far look like in abstraction?

MM: If there was one painting, I think it would definitely have more to do with our side trip to Leipzig. We went to the Bach museum, and they had some of his original musical scores. The marks on those, especially when he made a mistake, the Xs, those were so cool. It was all beautiful, even his musical notes, just the writing itself without music, that guy was channeling divinity. I feel like that would be the painting I would make, especially because I was with my children, and it was a really special experience to go there with them. 

S: Color is one of the only formal restraints you use in your work, do you always have an object source for your paintings?

(Maysha invites me to look at a large, neatly ordered scrapbook: inside are pasted clippings from vintage magazine photos, handwritten notes, paint swatches, and sketches of abstract shapes.)

MM: Every painting has a formula page. Some of them are from objects, but everything I use printed material from is in this book. That’s from a 1970s magazine for women’s entertaining: how to set your table, how to sew linens for your table. So I’ll pick these different things out and record the colors, and I pre-mix all the palettes.

S: Why did you shift from these studies to pursue art? And how has the prior work fed into this new choice?

MM: I always loved working in a lab and tinkering. All the custom equipment and pouring beakers. It brought this very clear sense of order toward pursuing some kind of truth.

I never thought about art doing that. I always thought science is an objective answer. But the deeper I got into science, the motivating questions didn’t interest me. I started out asking big questions like “What is consciousness?” And we could analyze how the neurons are firing in our individual brains, how our visual systems are working. But still, that doesn’t explain the experience you and I are having. That’s on a different plane. 

So I thought, what could be the thing that would give me that sense of satisfaction? And truly, it was pursuing questions about myself. How I feel in this world, and being a woman, and what I’mdoing here. These big questions. I think I brought the structured inquiry of the scientific method into this process, like the research notebook.