Amir Nikravan is an American artist of Iranian and Mexican descent. His hybrid objects, which fuse elements of painting, photography and sculpture, draw from a lineage of architecture that ranges from the Case Study modernist housing program, to the Orientalist public buildings of Edward Durell Stone, and the vernacular styles and finishes of the anonymous–often immigrant–builders of his native Los Angeles.
Centered around an interest in the politics of form - how form becomes a facade for meaning- and how it affects our understanding of surface, color, shape, architecture, and design, Nikravan’s most recent works employ the re-appropriation of Middle Eastern forms that have been filtered through the orientalist lens of Western Modernism. Triangulating between disparate coded styles and mediums, Nikravan’s objects work to challenge dominant formal meaning and destabilize a hierarchy that prioritizes one mode of form over all others, unearthing buried contradictions of a canon that has rarely been inclusive.