The Moon Belongs to Everyone by Stacy Mehrfar, is a response to the contemporary experience of migration - of shifting continents and mindsets.  A multi-layered visual narrative set in a non-locatable landscape, the book reflects upon the loss of roots, and search for belonging in the wake of immigration. 

I emigrated just after my 30th birthday. In Australia, the color of the flowers, the warm yellow of the sun, the oddly shaped trees were enchanting at first. But as time passed, I felt lost, in limbo. As an immigrant, my understanding of place, my sense of personal identity, even the impressions of my memories had shifted. Home became a place between here and there. I began to visually explore this sensation, making photographs in Australia and the United States. 

The Moon Belongs to Everyone, is an allegory for the in-between; for identity suspended between origin and destination, located in the crosshairs between the dissonant and the lyrical; a space I personally found myself in after leaving my homeland and migrating to a new country.

The book progresses through an alternating landscape of both time and perspective. In photographs of portraits, still lifes, architecture, landscape, and nature, patterns and sites converge and return later in seemingly different positions.  The solitary subjects of the portraits are unknown to each other and come from different parts of the world ­­– yet they are caught in a similar liminal space — hovering somewhere between ‘there’ and ‘here.’ When viewed together they are experienced as a collective, sharing common grounds.

Stacy Arezou Mehrfar is an Iranian American visual artist whose works address issues of place and belonging, memory and narrative, and the symbiotic relationship between the individual and the collective.

Published by GOST Books, March 2021.

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