David Heshmatpour

Dave is from Effingham, Illinois – the home of America’s second-largest cross.  

The son of a Persian surgeon and a child of the Iranian Diaspora, he began creating comics and short, live-action and animated films in childhood before gravitating towards figurative painting and sculpture.  

He gained a degree in Applied Science, specializing in welding technology, before graduating with a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2020.  

He lives and works alongside his very good dog Ruskin in Philadelphia. 

“I like to play with ideas, words, and symbols and explore the internal harmony or dissonance that can be created through those relationships.  

Recently, I’ve been making miniature landscapes with scrap electronics components and thinking about how the digital world and material reality are converging as two overlapping landscapes that we must learn how to navigate simultaneously in order to survive. 

Given the nature of much of my work, the more stringently I try to define its meaning, the more it directs the viewer’s personal experience of the object.  

I want to offer poetry that moves in multiple directions. 

I invite others to connect with it from their own context, in their own way, as well as engage with the shifting and overlapping layers of narrative and symbolism I’ve encoded into the work.   

In that way, I hope my work sparks conversations that could only happen in that particular room, at that particular time and place.  

Ultimately, my work is intended to be a catalyst for viewer questions, thoughts, ideas, inspirations, processes, emotions, recognition, and any reaction beyond what I could conceive of on my own.”