Ghazaleh Keshavarz “Naftoon”

Ghazaleh Keshavarz is a Middle Eastern artist who’s original major was Photography. When she was young she attended a high school focusing on the arts despite discouragement from her parents who wanted her to go to a more prestigious school as she was one of the top students in her class. She came to America to go to college at UMBC, where she began to develop her art further. She utilized see through images, reflective surfaces and sculptures made from the paper she used to prevent messes during her work.

Her primary focus is the importance of oil for her country. In her talk she discussed how her country’s economy is based on a single product, oil, and how that led to a weak economy. In her art she utilized oil as an extremely reflective surface, using it to project various images onto walls. She mixed it with a large amount of cooking oil in order as crude oil smells very bad and she wanted to minimize that. Her work is Entrepreneurial because she used her country’s most important export as a form of art in order to symbolize it’s important. It’s both an artistic and political statement.

Personally I was interested in various techniques she used in her art; I’ve found the play of light to always be something interesting to play with and Keshavarz used light in very interesting ways. I especially enjoyed her project where there were various pictures on planes of glass in a single white room. While I plane on working in animation, 3D modeling is what I plan on focusing on so perhaps I could use some of those ideas in creating unique environments in videos and games.