Umelec Magazine Issue 2/2008

Umelec Magazine has published a review entitled ‘Unfolding the Middle East: Kristen Alvanson’s Nonad’ (by Robin Mackay) on my ‘nonad’ exhibition in their current Issue 2/2008. Umelec is based in the Czech Republic and is published in English, German, Spanish and Czech.

Mackay begins, “In his 1998 book on Leibniz, philosopher Gilles Deleuze proposed the figure of ‘The Fold’ as a way in which a philosophy of immanence might measure the multiplicity of the uni­verse. If Being speaks in one voice, if we invoke no transcendent plane of organisation, then how can difference be articulated? Deleuze’s vision of folds-within-folds, which he discovers to be the reigning principle of the baroque, extends to labyrinthine structures enfolding infinite complexity (or implexity) without yielding to any form of transcendence. Kristen Alvanson, an American artist working in Iran, suggests that we read the Middle East, in all its obscurity, inscrutability and hybridity, in terms of such a topological model, as a fabric folded and refolded into a baffling surface where disparate elements abut unexpectedly and overlap each other in paradoxical fashion. Inversely, her recent work demonstrates how the multiple cultural codes at work in the region can be manifested through the folds of its fabrics…”

For more information on Umelec and where to purchase it check here: Umelec Magazine

For more information on work from my Cosmic Drapery Project, please visit a new section on my website which includes information on Nomadic Fabric Chadors, Spell Chadors, Cosmic Drapery Flags and Abjad-9. http://www.kristenalvanson.com/new/drapery.html