‘TERRIFYING, BUT ALSO COOL’
New owner of former body shop plans a space that will amplify artists’ perspectives
In a former auto body shop near Siler Road, an emerging gallery is embracing its inherited, industrial environment. New owner L.E. Brown said she plans to use the large garage door to aid with video installations. She smiled as she noted the floor’s leftover oil stains.
The 24-year-old, who moved to Santa Fe less than two years ago, is taking a leap of faith in opening up this space. After spending time working for other local galleries, she’s now focusing on her realm of expertise: contemporary art from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, and the diasporas from those areas.
“That’s what I’m exploring now,” she said about getting back to her passion, “which is terrifying, but also cool.”
Shortly after graduating college in 2015, the SoCal native began her post-grad art career working at Santa Fe’s Nedra Matteuci and GF Contemporary before deciding to open East of West.
She started studying the aforementioned regions’ contemporary scenes after learning as an adult that she was of Turkish descent and later spending a year in the country. It was while she was abroad that she discovered the region’s modern and diverse art offerings.
Now, with an artistic focus on parts of the world she says haven’t been covered in Santa Fe, she feels like she can not only educate locals about the art, but also broaden an understanding of cultures and people who often are stereotyped.
“In the media, there’s this dichotomy of this monolithic dimensional identity,” said Brown. “It’s really the refugee versus the terrorist. That’s all we hear about. A lot of people don’t understand or experience these very individual experiences that all of these communities have. Hopefully, this can start to expand those perceptions and facilitate a discussion that all of these people and communities are human: not just this mass blob of culture.”
East of West opens tonight with the premiere of its first exhibition. The show will feature six artists from across the world, including Turkey, Iran, Algeria and the U.S., who specialize in various contemporary media.
Brown said the exhibition doesn’t have an over-arching theme, a choice intended to leave her voice out of the conversation and instead “amplify” the artists’ own perspectives.
Madiha Siraj, a Dayton, Ohio-based multimedia artist originally from Pakistan, will be displaying her paintings and sculptures that bring a modern twist to Islamic geometric patterns. She’s always been drawn to the way Islamic artists used geometry to represent “order” within the universe, but she makes the shapes her own with a variety of colors and unconventional materials. Inspired by the vibrancy of Pakistani clothing, she uses beads and glitter within her designs.
“(My art) works within the quest for perfection and the inability to achieve it,” said Siraj.
New York-based photographer Maha Alasaker from Kuwait said she’s excited to show her pictures, which depict personal narratives about the female experience, and are displayed in a space showcasing the regions and cultures Brown is focusing on. Art is “always the place where you can speak without language,” she added.
Other artists in the show include Onur Ada, Shaghayegh Cyrous, Nasreen Shaikh Jamal al Lail and Younes Zemmouri.
Walking through the then-unfinished, twostory gallery last week, Brown said she hopes to dedicate the top floor’s exhibition space to these six creatives as mainstays and the downstairs for rotating shows. She wants to have a new exhibition every two months, along with regular lectures. Eventually, she’d like to incorporate a nonprofit component that allows for artist-in-residence programs.
Brown noted that the first floor includes a video installation viewing room and a library/reading room filled with her own contemporary art book collection. The second floor will also have a “riad,” a traditional Moroccan house space for relaxation that she likened to a “secret garden.”
Brown doesn’t want the space to elicit an air of “elitism,” which she said some galleries can do, discouraging visits by people who cannot afford the art inside. That’s why she’s adding the additional rooms and, for some pieces, not putting the art up for sale.
“I’m excited to make it a very interdisciplinary space … hopefully it will be a space that’s really accessible to all classes of the community.”