On view in Mile Zero Dance’s lobby until February 2025
Asal Andarzipour’s | Charged

About the feature artist:
Asal Andarzipour is a visual artist, curator, and designer based in Edmonton. She identifies as an immigrant settler artist walking in her nomad ancestors’ shoes. She started drawing the human figure as a teenager in Tehran’s underground studios. Her long journey across the ocean to New York and then Alberta continues to inform and form her creative profile. Her work explores themes of displacement, personal and collective trauma, and the psyche-body. She is a studio artist at Harcourt House Artist Run Centre and a Juried Member of the Alberta Society of Artists. Asal holds a BFA in Industrial Design, an MFA in Collaborative Design and an MA in History of Art, Design and Visual Culture.

About Charged: 
Charged is a collection of musings on charcoal and the human figure. The use of charcoal as a medium for drawing figures goes back to the pre-historic art of the caves. For Andarzipour, charcoal is the best medium to render the movement of the human figure, and capture the image on the surface without deceiving the impermanence of moments. In the life drawing process, a nude model poses for a limited time, welcoming the artist’s gaze. Through this embodied process of mark-making, the artist’s arm transmits the flesh energy into lifeless materials.