VAS Series Artist: Farrah Karapetian, Lecture

Farrah Karapetian is a Los Angeles based artist who works in sculpture, installation and photography. Much of her work is photo based which she achieves without the use of the camera in a process known as photograms. Karapetian explores reality and representation through the constructed image and the use of different mediums. She believes in transparency of process, and in the capacity of photography to communicate the marks of its making. Her work raises questions of the nature of—and difference between—abstraction and representation, pictorial and sculptural space, and the experience of control and surrender. While visiting her studio located on Exposition just off La Brea, she talked about her recent exhibitions, “Rock, Paper, Scissors” at the Orange County Museum and at LA Louver, which was based on performance and war veterans. Farrah received her BA in fine art from Yale University and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles . She has been a MacDowell Fellow (2010) and an artist-in-residence at the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War (2009) and earned a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her blog Housing Projects (2012)