Amy Khoshbin: Ghosts
October 23 - December 20, 2019
Rooted in a dystopic mythic narrative around death, perdition, and rebirth, GHOSTS explored ideas of grief, loss, greed, chaos, and corruption from the personal to the political. Through both humorous and melancholic installation, video, and sculpture, Khoshbin entered the conversation via the lens of her own story, with the recent loss of her father. Exploring legacy by using his personal artifacts and distinctive advice as source material, Khoshbin reflected on the universal and specific methodologies of memorialization– the archives and subsequent mythologies we leave behind. Specific books that formed her father’s ideology, such as Passages and Executive Time Management, became guides in traversing not only her Iranian father’s immigrant history as a manager in corporate America, but also the larger ideas of migration, belonging, and the failure of the American dream.
Khoshbin’s Iranian father was a character who reappears in her work as a conduit to explore identity and legacy through embodiment and performance. In GHOSTS, Khoshbin used photography, collage, and immersive installation to specifically focus on his role as a corporate businessman in America, his life spent seeking “success” - working his way up the ladder only to hit the glass ceiling because of his accent and heritage. Using science fiction tropes and historical research in her practice, Khoshbin focused on the cyclical fallacy of ideologies that subsume personal humanity in the service of capitalist gain.
Khoshbin took a critical position on the state of contemporary America. She approached today’s socio-political reality of a divided nation split between a heavily corporatized, white supremacist, patriarchal government and the proletariat. She used her personal history as source material while also pulling imagery and technique from ancient Egyptian dioramas, Persian miniature painting series such as the Shahnameh, and elements from corporate welcome packets as a means to demonstrate the systemic and cyclical continuity of power hierarchies throughout history. Notable pieces amongst this body of work included Lifetime Guarantee (2019), a life-size executive desk fashioned in the shape of a coffin– a nod to the current administration; Hellcome! (2019), a satirical corporate onboarding video; and Love you billions (2019), a death shroud hand-sewn from Khoshbin’s father’s handkerchiefs by the artist’s mother that spoke both to the Muslim and Baha’i funerary traditions of wrapping the body before burial, and the historic tradition of lovers embroidering messages to one another.
About the Artist
Amy Khoshbin’s practice advocates for changing commercial culture by using popular media genres to create connections and catharsis. Her work has been shown widely; notable institutions and galleries include: The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, Times Square Arts, Artpace, The High Line, Socrates Sculpture Park, Knockdown Center, National Sawdust, and festivals such as River to River and South by Southwest. Khoshbin has participated in numerous residency programs including The Watermill Center, Project for Empty Space, Anderson Ranch, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MANA Contemporary, and Banff Centre for the Arts. She is a Franklin Furnace Fund recipient and has received a Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant. Khoshbin is currently a 2019-2020 Artist in Residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center on Governor’s Island and part-time faculty at Parsons, The New School for Design and MFA-IA at Sierra Nevada College. Khoshbin received her M.A. at New York University and B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin.