Sahar Soheilisadigh
Fragments
August 14 - 25th, 2023
Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, open Monday to Friday, between 10-4pm
Closing Reception: Friday August 25th, at 7pm
Fragments is a sound and video installation that explores synesthetic experiences of everyday life. This installation is the result of my aspiration to discover a shared means of communication, a language that transcends geographical barriers, cultural influences, and symbolic representations—a language that exists even before meaning. Making sense of the external world begins with sensation and experiencing it through our senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and more. In my artistic practice, I employ light, shadows, sound, and silence to design sensory experiences for my viewer, embracing the act of pure sensation. Fascinated by the mysteries of human perception, I am particularly inspired by a rare neurological phenomenon called Coloured Hearing, which involves a visual perception of sound in shapes, colours and movements. Although not many people experience synesthesia, everyone can make synesthetic associations due to the engagement of all our senses in the creation of a sensory experience. The multisensory attribute of perception enables us to generate and comprehend metaphors and create visual mental images of objects, events and environments. Having mostly practiced in the domain of photography, I learned how to experience the outside world as an observer. In this video and sound installation, I adopt the perspective of an observer to discuss the ideas of nostalgia, pre-linguistic communication, solitude, displacement, intergenerational trauma, and public and private spaces. As a non-synesthete artist, I drew inspiration from my childhood memories to produce Fragments based on my sensory experiences of daily life, which are only fragments of reality.
About the Artist
Sahar Soheilisadigh is a multidisciplinary Iranian artist currently residing in Saskatchewan. She has earned her MA and BA in Visual Communication Design and is an MFA candidate at the University of Saskatchewan. Having been trained as a graphic designer and a photographer, she delves into the synesthetic aspects of everyday life. Her primary focus in her artistic practice lies in exploring metaphor and the multisensory nature of perception, as well as the significant role memory plays in recalling sensory encounters. In her digital works of art, she employs sound, silence, light, and shadows to initiate discussions on a wide range of themes, including nostalgia, pre-linguistic communication, solitude, displacement, intergenerational trauma, identity, and public and private spaces. Having mostly practiced as a photographer throughout these years, she takes the perspective of a passive observer to design sensory experiences for her audience and to put them in a physical and emotional context.
