Stories in Thousand Pieces: Parinaz Eleish

A mosaic of a thousand moments, scattered and torn, like coloured shards of glass put back into a whole. Fragments of laughter and pain, the colour of rain and the smell of sunsets, lives lived that speak memory and dream the future. To tell the story of a life, you search for footprints and traces of what you cannot see at a glance.

As an artist and a storyteller, she liked to focus on details within a greater context. Her canvases are large: what you see at a glance would be a structure, a space, or a fruit tree garden. As you get closer, you notice more and more details made of hundreds of tiny pieces. Close up, her painting communicates a different story than the one you saw from afar. It tells of the intricacies of our daily existence, the evidence of our past in our present.

Using mixed media allows her to build reality out of the many pieces. The paintings discuss politics with the viewer. She uses newspapers in her work because they witness their journey through time. They guide and even mislead us. The use of newspapers in her work can be random or intentional. She does not frame her paintings. The stories continue beyond the border of the canvas. As an observer of details of everyday life, she takes hundreds of actual and mental photos wherever she is and these inform the work she does. She see commonality in human existence and their shared everyday lives.