Negin Ehtesabian

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Technique: mixed media (pencil, pen, marker, gauche, paper collage)

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This series of artwork has been shown in:

2017    -Firefly no.3, Azad Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran

             -One Tent One Artwork, Dena Gallery, Tehran/ Iran

2016    - Solo show, Dena Gallery, Tehran, Iran

             -The First Stone, Apadana Gallery, Isfahan, Iran

2017    -Firefly no.1, Azad Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran

2014    -EX-Change(s), Chazou Gallery, British Columbia, Canada

2013    -The 6th Tehran Biennial of Illustration, Saba Cultural Center, Tehran, Iran

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Medusa’s archetype is a powerful but repressed woman; She is a woman who is seduced and victimized but turned to a monster, so she is considered as an icon for women’s rage and revenge and it is one of the classic feminism icons.

Her defeat by Perseus who avoids looking into her eyes in order to be able to kill her could be seen as a symbol for the deception that social paradigms impose on people, so they go against certain values with closed eyes otherwise, they might be spellbound by it.  However, Perseus will keep Medusa's head and use it to overcome his enemies, because he is well aware of its power.

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Medusa is the forbidden fruit; Shown as a monster for people to avoid, or for women to be afraid of being like her: unique, powerful and fearless because they don't want to be an ugly unwanted monster, they don't want to be abandoned to the island of loneliness or even lose their life at the end.

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They say Medusa lived in that far away island all alone, and make men into stones as soon as they looked into her eyes. They say her island was full of men who were turned to stone. But, if no one never came back from that island, then who told the story to them?

Maybe she was an artist; a sculpture; Maybe she created sculptures of those men before they leave the island. And those men never go back to their homeland, because they had had the forbidden fruit and couldn't un-known what they already knew. They couldn't go back and live amongst people who didn't understand them.

So, this is true, no one ever went back from the island! and people who never visited the island, and never met Medusa, made up all this story of a female monster who kills men, just because they didn't want anyone else to go there because they were well aware of her power; the power of knowledge. 

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On the other hand, Medusa is not the woman whom people could stare at her beauty and desire her, she isn't the object she is the one who looks at them and sees the beauty in the world; She is the observer. She stares into their eyes and makes them see things that they can never un-seen again. No wonder that they want to destroy her.

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All women could be Medusa, but some might be living life in the dark, ignorance and fear; or on the other hand, they might have lost balance and got lost in their endless greed for the materialistic world of power and perfection. Their curse could be their intense selfish desire to be so perfect and successful and do anything for this desire.

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Medusa series is about many women today, struggling with the power inside and out.

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