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Internal Landscapes
20 OCTOber - 19 NOVEMBERHeadline gallery is pleased to present the work and interview of Vancouver based contemporary fine art photographer and filmmaker Stephanie Nelia Varasteh. Through her practice, Varasteh explores how we relate to the soma, body, and the pathways in which we interact with the natural elements that surround us. Varasteh's images explore the internal landscapes that give us individuality and how movement can grant us agency over our emotions and actions. Themes of love, grief, anger, and betrayal manifest within the photographer's images as she illuminates the intimate felt spaces between skin, bone, and the body's soft tissues, transporting audiences into a reflective and vulnerable state of humanness.
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Stephanie Nelia VarastehSOMA 2, 2021
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What is Soma?
I hear a lyrical binding between bodies and souls in this word. Our somatic experiences can be so subtle and are often submerged under the busy bustling of our digital age. By cultivating a relationship with the vessel through which our soul is carried we are offered a deep and powerful opportunity to experience our senses as sensual expressions of living.
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Movement and dance are two themes that you highlight within this series. Do you have a background in dance?
I started ballet at the age of 4. Throughout my life, movement practices of all shapes have attracted me. When I came to the place where my body was broken regularly by what the dancing profession asked of it, I reconsidered. I still dance, because it will always be a part of me, but I no longer prepare for the stage.
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How can movement help us discover our internal landscapes?
I think the ways in which we learn the language of our bodies is something special and utterly unique. We hold evolving conversations with our bodily form throughout our lifetimes. It is so easy to be with the noise. It is so easy to lose touch with who we are internally and externally. The authentic self is at the mercy of our whirling minds.
But, when we give ourselves space, and time, to slow down our bodies they find their way back to breath and feeling. We reconnect. The body is always willing to re-open the conversation. It speaks in frequencies and waves with great knowledge and offers us quiet pathways to places long forgotten, or never known, within ourselves. We find what feels foreign and are opened to new possibilities. Both touch and movement have done this for me. I won’t sugar coat the discomfort and pain that was a part of this rediscovery but every bit of it was worthwhile for the freedom gained.
Movement can help us access emotions that are held within our muscles, bones, and tissues. Every body has stored an entire life of conscious and unconscious experiences. The body holds these memories for us in case we need them. Movement allows these emotions or energies an opportunity to be expressed when we don’t have access to coherent understanding. In this way, movement is a primal action of expressing what is unspeakable. Movement is a way in, but it is also a way out.
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Human touch is something we have been missing since the pandemic. Why do you feel it is important to highlight this in your work?
Touch helps us connect to, and form relationships with, ourselves and others. The experience of intimacy through touch adds depth to how we relate to one another. Whether this connection happens between lovers, friends, with nature, or with the Self, it offers unspoken eloquence in a discussion with what is unknown. Such intimate encounters, I believe, create space for ever deepening relationships with ourselves and our bodies. We uproot what we have been conditioned to suppress.
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Dancers - Daria Mikhaylyuk & Benjamin Defaria
Music by Nathan Shubert
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Do you partake in a research process before starting a project? Are there specific texts you have used as references?
For this project I thought often of the poem “Coleman’s Bed” by David Whyte. There’s a great line in there that reads “make yourself a door through which to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you”. I feel that line when I listen to Olafur Arnalds, Hania Rani, Vivaldi, or Dustin O’Halloran. Living life and moving through the motions is often enough inspiration for my projects.
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Stephanie Nelia VarastehSOMA 14, 2021
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In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. I have come to this lonely place and here is this other.
- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
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Where were the gravel shots taken? How did you come across this landscape?
I came across these large, gravel mounds out in Richmond two summers ago at Iona Regional Park. Instead of taking my usual stroll along the water, I decided to take an alternate path, which lead me to these desert-like dunes by the water.
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The definition of “readability” is “the ease with which a reader can understand a written text” but this can also be applied to the visual arts. How do you read or interpret photography?
When I view photography, I’m mostly curious about the root and the story. In my own work I hope to provoke (self) reflection. I want my viewers to question their presence in their own bodies. I want to bring about quiet hints of time. While the spaces in us, that hold the secret stories of the body, aren’t exactly easy to access I do wish to bring the stirring of such things forward. The familiarity of being human is the ultimate goal of my work.
If you were to suggest one place in Vancouver someone goes to feel inspired or invigorated, where would this be?
Anywhere you are. There are such grand opportunities to be present in the space you inhabit. Vancouver is a beautiful place to be still. These days, I’m finding great inspiration from the landscapes I hold and discover within myself.
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