Artists and deserts. They seem to go hand in hand. The desert is a romantic symbol of isolation and retreat, a place of reflection and sparseness in which an oasis - a refuge of plenty and relief - is carved out. It is the landscape of transition; one does not stay except at those little fertile spots. Rest a while and then on into the forbidding wasteland until the next oasis. This image - of the artist as nomad - is more than a convenient trope in the life and work of Mark Shetabi, whose personal odyssey from Iran in the 1970s to America, has loaded him with cargo of memories and images upon which he reflects in elegantly realized installations and paintings. Concealing landscapes inside walls, accessible only through tiny peepholes, Shetabi domesticates distance, contains vastness in dream-like miniatures where the dialog between wet and dry is the central conversation. The remove from which we regard his landscapes seems especially apt. Often, they are concealed within ordinary architectural elements. In installations such The Oasis (2001), we peer through peepholes in sterile doors and drywall to the fantastic vistas beyond. These voyeuristic encounters with enigmatic, artificial spaces resonate with other messages hidden in artistic bottles, most memorably Velázquez's complex and famously ambiguous rendering of his studio in Las Meninas, which Shetabi quotes in his work. Seemingly at each level of their image and fabrication, Shetabi has invested his work with the capacity to function as metaphor. Illusory exterior spaces are contained within interior spaces, visible only through lenses that define and distort our view. Arid and forbidding a subject as the desert may be, Mark Shetabi attains a surprisingly rich harvest from its apparent harshness.

Shetabi received his B.A. from Western Washington University, Bellingham, and his M.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited by the Bowery Gallery, New York, Washington Art Association, Washington Depot, Conn., and the Project Room, Levy Gallery for the Arts in Philadelphia at Moore College of Art, Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia Art Alliance, and Arthur Ross Gallery, all in Philadelphia. In the fall of 2002, his work will be exhibited in a Challenge Exhibition at Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial.