Rex (Alexandra) Delafkaran
Tender Bits
August 3 – September 2, 2018
Tender Bits is dedicated to those sweet, gritty places, tender thoughts and desires; it calls attention to our bodies and their dubious relationship to both cultural identity and intimacy. What languages and tools do we have to describe and access that intimacy in our bodies and in our cultures? Tender Bits is endearing and uncomfortable, soft and sarcastic, tender and trying.
Delafkaran uses her experience as a queer, Iranian-American woman as a
vehicle for expressing these ideas, as well as her research in the sociopolitical
tension and history that now frames that experience. The show explores the relationship between cultural practices, desire, and utility. The installation
embraces the humor and awkwardness that conversations around intimacy
provoke, and poses questions about the vulnerability and repercussions inherent
to related practices.
Employing Persian motifs, craft, industrial hardware and performance, Tender Bits further accesses aesthetics of repetition, eroticization, and failure congruently in order to explore the multiplicity of bodily experiences and their dynamic relationship to language.
Rex (Alexandra) Delafkaran is an interdisciplinary artist from San Francisco,
California. After earning her BFA in Sculpture and Performance Art from the
San Francisco Art Institute, she relocated to Washington, DC working in local
galleries. She performs and exhibits her work along the East Coast, working out of Red Dirt Studios, and on curatorial projects of her own.
