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bio
Rex Delafkaran is an interdisciplinary artist from California, based in Chicago. Delafkaran makes her work through a combination of research and material study, producing sculpture, ceramics, performance, and writing. Through her queer, Iranian, American, and aesthetic lineages she plays with the failure and poetry among bodies, objects, and language.
Delafkaran has exhibited and performed at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, DC; Panoply Performance Lab, NY; Platform Projects, Greece; Satellite Art Fair, FL; and EXPO Chicago, IL, among others. She is a recipient of a Warhol Foundation ‘Wherewithal Research Grant’ and recently awarded the Eldon Danhausen Sculpture Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
bio
Rex Delafkaran is an interdisciplinary artist from California, based in Chicago. Delafkaran makes her work through a combination of research and material study, producing sculpture, ceramics, performance, and writing. Through her queer, Iranian, American, and aesthetic lineages she plays with the failure and poetry among bodies, objects, and language.
Delafkaran has exhibited and performed at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, DC; Panoply Performance Lab, NY; Platform Projects, Greece; Satellite Art Fair, FL; and EXPO Chicago, IL, among others. She is a recipient of a Warhol Foundation ‘Wherewithal Research Grant’ and recently awarded the Eldon Danhausen Sculpture Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Delafkaran has exhibited and performed at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, DC; Panoply Performance Lab, NY; Platform Projects, Greece; Satellite Art Fair, FL; and EXPO Chicago, IL, among others. She is a recipient of a Warhol Foundation ‘Wherewithal Research Grant’ and recently awarded the Eldon Danhausen Sculpture Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
artist statement
Through objects I try to understand what labor and language feels like; what does it look like? Using bodies and movement as my center, I investigate the humor, formality, and discomfort found when ideas are expressed with or through a specific body, shape, or material. I wade through personal and cultural minutiae to make sense of how we position ourselves in relation to one another. I use found objects with a history, symbolically charged materials like beeswax and salt, and craft materials like clay, wood and metals. The resulting artworks tie materials to history or location, production to labor and capital, and performance to the exercise of embodiment.
I am dedicated to fruitful failures and the awkwardness of tenderness. My work explores the physical distance between where I come from and where I am. I ask where we mythologize utility and identity. What I do is in reaction to the disillusionment, pleasure, curiosity, and anxiety of living in systems of categorization. The categorization of people through labor and commodification is overwhelming, and intersects with personal and collective identities. Language has the ability to be both concrete and gelatinous, and my practice plays with the failures of language.
I question and exercise existing cultural systems through my queer, Iranian, American, and feminist aesthetic lineages in hopes to connect and understand.
I am dedicated to fruitful failures and the awkwardness of tenderness. My work explores the physical distance between where I come from and where I am. I ask where we mythologize utility and identity. What I do is in reaction to the disillusionment, pleasure, curiosity, and anxiety of living in systems of categorization. The categorization of people through labor and commodification is overwhelming, and intersects with personal and collective identities. Language has the ability to be both concrete and gelatinous, and my practice plays with the failures of language.
I question and exercise existing cultural systems through my queer, Iranian, American, and feminist aesthetic lineages in hopes to connect and understand.
