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Painting
Oil stick and acrylic on a machine-made rug
all 41 works →
About & contact
Paasha Motamedi (b. 1990, Del Mar, California) is an Iranian-Indonesian-American artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Los Angeles. His father’s family is Iranian and his mother is Indonesian. He grew up on Coronado Island, where she taught him the flavors of Persian cooking in a kitchen straight out of Under the Tuscan Sun while the Food Network blared Emeril Live. In 2012 he graduated from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a concentration in the economic and social history of costume and fashion. That training still guides his choice of materials.
He wrote before he made images. Since 2012 his features, artist profiles, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The Creative Independent, The Panafold, Unemployed Magazine, and Mid Cult. With The Haikuists, he has spent more than a decade improvising verse on a typewriter at live events for clients such as SpaceX, Tiffany & Co., Bloomingdale’s, and National Geographic. His own poems approach migration and inherited history through the senses, and their cadence carries into his visual work.
After he got sober in 2015, he began shooting slow-motion video and stills. His pictures have since run in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, The Panafold, and No Tokens Journal. The work started on the street and turned toward personal reportage on diaspora and autochthony, the question of who counts as native to a place. Family Portrait, an exhibition at Hunter College in New York, was built entirely around his photographs. In his series Zero, every frame is the first on its roll of film, the one a camera needs before it can make a full exposure.
His paintings begin with Persian-style rugs that were made in factories. He applies oil stick and acrylic to them, along with saffron, black lime, pomegranate, sabzi, sand, and fire. Objects like these are orientalism priced for the mass market, and he treats that consumer fetish as his subject, alongside migration and the hybrid identity of third-culture kids. Perfumes he composes to evoke the dishes of his childhood kitchen, gheimeh and beef rendang among them, accompany the rugs. He works in cycles, and long pauses separate the bursts of production.
He started curating in 2019, and the shows he has organized in Los Angeles include Second World at KNOWN Studio and one at Wonzimer. He held the IKEA Residency in 2023 and joined the Wonzimer Artist Residency Program in 2024.
Film is the newest part of his practice. Opa, Last Days (2026, 15:45) covers the final two days of his grandfather’s life, and Opa dies before the documentary ends. Motamedi was its director, producer, cinematographer, and editor, and it is now in festival submission. Everything he makes is meant to be deeply personal and as true to life as possible. He is making a series of shorts and developing a docufiction in which a real couple restages an argument they already had. For that project he looks to two films in which people play themselves, Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and Chloé Zhao’s The Rider. He wrote a questionnaire for each partner to answer before production, and their accounts of the fight will guide his blocking and framing. The scenes will be built from long takes and empty space.
Education
- B.A., NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study — 2012
Residencies
- Wonzimer Artist Residency Program, Los Angeles — 2024
- IKEA Residency — 2023
Curatorial
- Second World, KNOWN Studio, Los Angeles
- Wonzimer, Los Angeles
- Curating since — 2019
Selected exhibitions
- Works In Progress, KNOWN Studio, Los Angeles — 2023
- Fin de Siècle, Wonzimer, Los Angeles — 2023
- Family Portrait, Hunter College, New York — 2019
Photography published in
The New York Times · Los Angeles Times · Hyperallergic · The Panafold · No Tokens Journal
Writing published in
The Creative Independent · The Panafold · Unemployed Magazine · Mid Cult
