A Public Exploration of Privacy
By Abraham Storer
May 11, 2022
Kamrooz Aram’s Chicago exhibition reflects his Wellfleet experiences
Iran and Wellfleet are worlds apart, yet the painter Kamrooz Aram managed to find memories of his native country in the reflections of Wellfleet’s kettle ponds on two visits to the Outer Cape in the past year. “When the pond is still and the trees are reaching down and also reaching up, I’m reminded of palaces in Iran with reflecting pools,” he explains from his studio in Brooklyn, referencing the architectural wonder Chehel Sotoun in Isfahan, Iran, with its large pool reflecting the building’s 20 columns.
Aram, who emigrated from Iran to the U.S. at age eight, has spent most of his career in New York. His first awareness of Cape Cod was as the name of a cocktail, but he started visiting on a regular basis when friends from graduate school, ICA/Boston chief curator Eva Respini and artist-designer Jacob Dyrenforth, bought a place in Wellfleet. He stayed at their home in August and December 2021 and found the mental space to plan his current show in Chicago.
In Privacy, A Notebook, Aram writes: “In Wellfleet I encounter a natural space that is neither social nor private. Perhaps it is public in a broad sense, but is a space that functions on the periphery of society altogether considered to be public?”
This peculiarity of the Cape Cod National Seashore reverberates in memories of his mother’s childhood home and reflections on domestic Iranian architecture, with its division of public and private quarters and their gardens as “transitional spaces.” With his exhibition on the horizon, these musings raised concerns about the Arts Club of Chicago as a “private club with a public exhibition space,” resulting in the eventual creation and installation of work addressing tensions between public and intimate spaces, perhaps best illustrated in a sheer screen he installed in one of the galleries, partitioning a space as inaccessible yet revealing its content — an intimate porcelain bust.