With a preternatural sense of observation, Orkideh Torabi reminds us that action cannot exist in the infinitive. There is no “to play chess,” there is only playing. Narration is a key ingredient in her paintings - first and foremost - Torabi is a fictionalist. “Usually, when I start a painting, I have a story in my mind, and those stories come from my memories, experiences, or something I have read,” says the artist. “A lot of my work is my own personal battle between what goes on inside of me and the outside world.”  This struggle for extrapolation is generative of the drama we see played out in her paintings time and again with the figures depicted as a cast of sorts and her interiors a stage set for drama.

 “In previous works, my focus was on gender-segregated environments, such as public baths and coffee houses, to address issues around patriarchy, social norms, and power structure,” explains Torabi. “The new paintings are more personal and look more like a battleground. Everyone is fighting or competing with each other, and it's based on a feeling I have about life in general.” Feats of strength both mental and physical serve as vehicles for the painter’s exploration of this tension: bull riding, arm wrestling, riding an inverted camel , etc….The latter painting  '6 AM Sharp' seems like an exercise in radical futility, at first.  The character is upside down on a camel while holding a plunger instead of an arrow, as if to suggest that while he is clearly challenged, his efforts could not be of any real significance. Furthermore, the title hints that one could have just awoke and found themselves facing such a folly of circumstance.

There is sarcasm in the exhibition title for this show, “When mom is out” as it cloaks the creator’s role as matriarch to her subjects. The characters in the paintings - as Torabi argues - are like children. “When mom is around, she tries to keep everything in order, but when she’s gone, these kids mess everything up, get into fights, and do whatever they want,” explains the artist. “It's criticizing a society where there is no ‘mom,’ or in other words, women are missing from it. Which, as a result, will cause society to be out of balance. Of course, there is nothing wrong with any individual character in each painting, but it feels like something is missing when looking at all the works as a whole—the other side of the story.”