KRISTEN ALVANSON WEBSITE ANNOUNCEMENT
www.kristenalvanson.com

The interactions of things, the undulation of entities in the space, the art of stitching events together, or in a word, cosmogenesis of all kinds requires abundant sewing work and notions artistry.

American Artist Kristen Alvanson, who relocated to Iran in 2006, has created a new website Artistry of Notions and Cosmic Drapery highlighting her current projects including Middle Eastern focused Maskh Project, Graveyards and Lumpen Orientalism as well as a section on the artist’s forthcoming book entitled ‘Lessons in Schizophrenia’ and her dESIRE Project.
Maskh Project – the connotation of the word maskh in Farsi is more than metamorphosis; it includes experiencing limits of one’s identity or existence usually with the assistance of new independent vehicles of material and abstract articulation, as in the case of spirit possession. Maskh project is a visual compendium of drawings diagramming Alvanson’s metamorphoses in the Middle East in the form of spells and maps.
Graveyards project as a psycho-geographic exploration of Middle Eastern graveyards, entombments and post-mortem spaces escapes necromanticism or fascination with ruins by illustrating the cognition and encounters with space and time – and consequently the twofold of dwelling and thinking – in the Middle East.
Lumpen Orientalism gathers the fragments of a lost civilization, the decaying parts of a once breathing animal. Named after a term suggested by China Miéville, Lumpen Orientalism is a photo-blog engendering an anomalous fascination with the Middle East in a similar way to the mongrel techniques of Gilles Deleuze, H. P. Lovecraft, Gaëtan Clérambault and William Beckford for tackling this enigmatic monstrosity – the Middle East.
Lessons in Schizophrenia is the artist’s forthcoming book, based on real events which led her to leave the US for the Middle East in a cataclysmic process. It includes an introduction by the Iranian Philosopher Reza Negarestani entitled Epithemic.
The dESIRE Project is an ongoing investigation on desire which includes artistic components; it is an attempt to reach concrete but not necessarily corporeal definitions of desire by tapping into its obscure formations. dESIRE Project is intertwined with the mathematics of natural numbers, countability / uncountability, pimp as a nomadic dissipater, stock market, legal contracts, intangibility and expendability of desires. Alvanson’s dESIRES, both intangible and their photographic representations, are for sale on the Market section of her website.

Visit the website here: www.kristenalvanson.com.