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Seyed Alavi left his home in Iran as a student, immigrating to California to attend college.
His work is often engaged with the poetics of language and space and their power to shape reality. His large conceptual work and public art invariably springs from wordplay and symbolism. Alavi states that language is another medium such as paint and clay.
In past installations, Alavi's dialogue has included carving the rapturous words of a 14th-century mystical poet into a wooden table and overflowing the incised letters with honey. He has placed mirrored poems into a pool, their meaning obscured by random water dropped from the ceiling when a motion detector sensed a visitor; he's used the language of saints from different faiths to examine their sameness; and he's lettered the mellifluous Farsi of his homeland onto walls.
Alavi has also worked extensively with teenage artists, using the communication tools of graffiti and comic books to help the youths express their own democratic yearnings to make a mark on society. While he is dedicated to making his work as populist as possible, his private aspirations remain concerned with achieving the egoless state of the mystical experience.
Alavi has received grants from the NEA/ US-Japan Creative Artists' Fellowship; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; The Creative Work Fund, and The LEF Foundation.
See Seyed Alavi online.