About the show:

Through the work of Ernest. G Welch School of Art & Design alumni Darya Fard and Lizzy Storm, “Myth Material,“ curated by EC Flamming, explores the slippery connections between revolution and metamorphosis through printmaking, projections, and multimedia installation. In both revolution and metamorphosis there is often a vision for the future, but the outcomes ultimately are unknown. Moments of immense change and transformation become an exercise in the release of control, as revolution is predicated by the dissolution of perceivable forms and the receding and submergence of preceding ideas.  ”Myth Material” challenges our notions of order and power in relation to political and social hegemony and offers suggestions of what can be found amid chaos and sacrifice. Darya Fard’s work considers Iran’s ongoing revolution, mythical allegories, and symbolic acts of resistance through origami pieces, projected video, and movement. Lizzy Storm investigates how to use the earth’s elements to achieve liberatory methods, and how to see ourselves amid cycles and symbols of nature. Together, Fard and Storm create an immersive inquiry into how acts of revolution can not only bring about unpredictable change, but also a melting of our sense of place in the universe.

The exhibition will run through August 29.

About the curator:

EC Flamming is a writer and curator based in Atlanta, GA. Her work focuses on the impacts of contemporary art to explore how cultural consumption shapes and reflects social relations. She has written for Art Basel, ART PAPERS, ArtsATL, BURNAWAY, Paste, Photograph, Another Gaze, and Screen Slate. In Summer 2023, she curated the exhibition “Slow Drip Loud Echo” at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University, which considered different strategies and potentials of creating work that centers family history. EC's interests include moving image and media studies, the Atlanta art community, and the Southern contemporary art scene at large.

About the artists:

Lizzy Storm (b. 1990, NJ, USA) is an artist and educator residing in Atlanta, GA. Her layered, textured abstractions evoke human consciousness and environmental awareness in deep time. She received her MFA in Studio with a concentration in Drawing & Painting from Georgia State University in 2022 and graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustration in 2012. Her work has been exhibited at non-profits, artist-run spaces, universities, museums, and arts centers in the Northeast and Atlanta. She is a Visiting Lecturer of Foundations at the Welch School of Art and Design at GSU.

Darya Fard is a multidisciplinary artist with Printmaking concentration whose work examines poetry, mythology, and psychological studies. Darya received her MFA degree from GSU, Atlanta, and her first MFA degree in painting in Iran, Tehran. Her primary aesthetic concern is in intersecting visual art and time-based mediums with Persian literature, mythology, and psychology incorporating scientistic studies and natural phenomena. In her studio practice and recent installations, she used various printmaking techniques like lithography, intaglio, silkscreen, woodcut/linocut, mono-print, and alternative photographic processes, translating them in ways that invite viewer participation and allow them to be integrated into other mediums like video, sound, dance, and shadow to create an atmospheric space.