Salon 94 Freemans is proud to present I Without End, an exhibition of new work by Laleh Khorramian. This will be the artist’s second solo show with the gallery. The exhibition features an eponymous animation, and a new sculptural work in stained glass.

I Without End (6:20 min) captures an erotic encounter. The couple, carved out of orange peels, is shot in time-lapse animation, capturing an unexpectedly sensual and human drama. The lovers are androgynous, coarsely comical but intensely engaged, their heads skewed in place with pins. Caught somewhere between living and dying, the figures decay rhythmically, until all moisture is gone from the fruit and their movements subside. The soundtrack creates a texture of tactility and friction, and is the sonic parallel of the images. The absurdity of fruit peel as a human metaphor brings two realities together: the physicality of the material world, and the equal force of the inner world of desire, emotion, sex, love, and intimacy. I Without End explores the unrestrained sense of fantasy that intimacy can produce, a universe that is present and real even when that lover/being is no longer physically present.

Khorramian’s work uses cinema to explore painting and drawing in time. She uses the discarded as a creative strategy, to consider the transience of life and its cycles of depletion and plenitude. Matter decays, but always recreates itself. Her work often moves between the minute and the massive, and brings out the creative possibilities of this movement.

The setting of I Without End, is a spacious yet intimate dwelling of various windows. These physical aspects lend a sacred grace. The companion sculptural piece, Green as a Heart, is a replica in stained glass of one of the rose-shaped windows seen in the house. The title Green as a Heart refers to the works closeness to the “secret fire” that represents the living spirit of organic matter.

I Without End was originally inspired by a Louise Bourgeois anecdote about her father peeling an orange in the shape of a figure. It is the third in a cycle of five animations, part of the artist’s ongoing experiment in combining the mediums of drawing, painting and cinema. Khorramian structures each episode around a primal element—earth, air, water, fire, and space. I Without End takes fire as its inspiration, both as a energetic force and an emotional metaphor.