‘About Time’ Solo Exhibition in London
Cyrus’s second solo exhibition with Artvisor opened on 10 May 2022, during the key week of ‘Photo London’ fair. The show presented new, unique composite works made from original polaroid photographs. This extract from Piero Tomassoni’s exhibition text describes Cyrus’s composite technique:
This ability of the artist to escape temporal and spatial plans is further enhanced by the use of the ‘composite’, a meticulous combination of two or more parts of different polaroids. The composite generates an ulterior image which is entirely a product of the artist’s imagination, falling outside of the times and places of the original pictures. In these, bodies become minerals, trees become rivers, England becomes Italy. Time becomes an even stranger substance, with the passionate and extreme light of dusk morphing into sunrise through the tentacular forms of wild vegetation.
Further to this, Tomassoni notes:
Mahboubian has always seen the concept of time as central to his work. Both thematically, with regards to what his pictures are and represent, and in terms of the way he conducts his practice. The latter is an ideological (oppositional) deceleration. He deliberately chooses to limit himself to a small number of shots per day, in order to distance himself from the permeative collective neurosis of capturing hundreds of images at a time thanks to digital apparatus (cameras and phones). This radical, reactionary practice is aided by the use of old polaroid film as his elective support; the film is no longer in production, therefore inherently scarce, and its ageing immediately conveys the impression of a vintage photograph. Similarly, the iconography of his works defy any temporal determination. The landscapes of Dorset, Oxfordshire, Cornwall, are, in Mahboubian’s photographs, the same as five hundred, or ten thousand, years ago.
About Time ran until 7 June 2022. Installation images below.