The Moon belongs to Everyone is a meditation on the contemporary experience of migration. Growing up a first-generation Iranian-American, Stacy Arezou Mehrfar (@stacymehrfar) migrated to Australia and became interested in how the process of migration disrupts perceptions of borders, identity and belonging.
The Moon Belongs to Everyone, came out of a need to research and visually examine this experience, the photographer’s visual exploration of how shifting continents marks an ever-changing landscape of time and perspective. The project consists of a series of photographs and an eight channel immersive video installation. A photobook of the work will be published by GOST Books, London in mid 2020.
Converging pictures of architecture, still life, landscape, and solitary figures, patterns and sites seemingly return in slightly different positions. This mashup of social, political and cultural ideas of space is a reflection upon the loss of home, belonging, roots, borders and community.
Stacy Mehrfar
© Stacy Mehrfar
The portraits in the series are of immigrants, of individuals like herself who no longer define themselves by national borders but rather by the experience of expatriation. Imaged in isolation, in seemingly different spaces yet viewed together as a series, the individuals are experienced as a collective, sharing a common, non-specific space.
Stacy Mehrfar
© Stacy Mehrfar
The landscapes and the still lives are allegories for place, belonging and recollection, representative of the stories the subjects told during the interview with the artist. The whole project was shot in Australia and the United States.
Stacy Arezou Mehrfar, currently lives in New York, NY. Stacy resided in Sydney, Australia from 2008- 2016, where she completed an MFA (Research) at the University of New South Wales, Art & Design, and was a lecturer in photo-media at several arts colleges.