About a year and a half before the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned a public billboard installation from Hadi Falapishi—the joyfully colorful, somewhat narratively ambiguous “Almost There” (2023), depicting a dog, a cat, and a mouse atop a small boat headed for a distant island shore, a smiling human figure propping them up from below—Falapishi already had a vision for its epic closing ceremony.
In the spring of 2022, Falapishi had a show called “Young and Clueless” at the Power Station, a not-for-profit contemporary art space in south Dallas, at which he’d presented, among other things, a boat suspended from the ceiling, with some of his creations—a photogram and several sculptures—nested inside of it. “I had the idea of having a boat basically traveling around the world,” Falapishi explains. It would be like a floating exhibition, ferrying works (in spirit, if not necessarily in practice) from one venue to another.
After Dallas came “Getting Closer,” at Champ Lacombe in Biarritz, France, where a new boat, also filled with artworks, was mounted on wooden stands; and then “As Free as Birds,” at the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London, where another sat on the building’s rooftop, “as if it had fallen from the sky,” as Falapishi puts it. He wanted the grand voyage to conclude in New York, his home of the past nine years, where the stark architecture of David Hammons’s Day’s End (2021), a permanent sculpture set just across the street from the Whitney, would frame Falapishi’s vessel as it came in from New Jersey, now with the artist himself onboard. (Yes, this time the boat would actually be waterborne.)
Falapishi’s richly varied practice not only spans multiple media—painting, sculpture, collage, performance, labor-intensive photograms (for a taste of his range, see “Games, Gamblers Cartomancers: The New Cardsharps,” a group show up at the Vernon House in Newport, Rhode Island, where Falapishi has four works on display—and is devising yet another grand finale)—but also multiple vernaculars. Though a skilled oil painter, he has often embraced something like an art brut style, centering crudely rendered figures (both human and animal) in all manner of mischievous configurations. (“The vibe was warm and welcoming but suspiciously so,” a critic for Artforum remarked of Falapishi’s exhibit in Biarritz, where the boat lived alongside “assemblages of plush toys, crayon-scribbled cardboard, and decorative ceramics,” as well as more merry dogs, cats, and mice, which the artist fondly calls his “characters.”)
However, layered beneath the seeming naivete is a dynamic exploration of family units, identity, hierarchy, conflict, and belonging. A native of Tehran, Iran—he moved to the United States to attend Bard College, where he received his MFA in photography in 2016—Falapishi points to “Almost There” as among the most personal statements he’s ever made. To his mind, it’s an immigration story; about departing one place for the uncertain promise of something better somewhere else. “Coming from Iran, basically when I was thinking of the States, it meant going toward the West—going toward where the sun sets,” Falapishi says.
This week, in honor of the final day of “Almost There” up on 95 Horatio Street, Falapishi finally brought his long-gestating vision to life—or, sort of, anyway. Initially, he’d planned to launch his stuffed-animal-covered boat from New Jersey on Monday, September 18. (It would be drawn across the river by a tugboat.) Then, due to bad weather and choppy conditions on the Hudson, the performance was delayed to that Friday. Things were going fairly smoothly then until, halfway to Day’s End, the tugboat and Falapishi were turned around mid-voyage, once again due to the rough water.
“All the weekend and Monday we were just waiting for the rain to stop,” Falapishi tells me later, over email. Finally, he decided to try something else. The artist had recently thrown a large clay pot that he hadn’t yet fired. “I liked that the vessel shape resembled a boat, and that it could hold three stuffed animals: a cat, a dog, and a mouse, just like in the billboard,” he explains. So, the ever-inventive Falapishi changed courses, and on Tuesday he carried the pot aloft himself, through the Meatpacking District and across the West Side Highway, to Day’s End.
Once there, shortly before dusk, Falapishi did something rather shocking, by any New Yorker’s standards: “I chose to become an embodiment of the billboard image, and I jumped into the Hudson with the pot and animals above my head,” he writes. “Then, unable to sustain carrying the pot above the water, the pot became a boat that slowly dissolved…a poetic end to the billboard’s image.” (He was dressed for the extraordinary occasion in custom Super Yaya, his look a nod to Federico Fellini’s classic 1954 film La Strada, about a troupe of traveling street performers. Designer Rym Beydoun matched the costume’s shade of blue to the one in “Almost There.”)
Although happily settled down in the city with artist Phoebe Derlee, whom he married earlier this year, for Falapishi, the specter of elsewhere—of somewhere different, somewhere better, something more—has lingered on since his childhood in Iran. “When you happen to be on that side of the West Side Highway, when you look through [Day’s End], if you’re lucky, you’ll see the sun is still going down,” he says. Even within the context of his own work—where else can his practice go from here?—the metaphor is too poetic to resist. “For sure, I would comfortably say that human that’s under that boat [in “Almost There”] is me in the real world,” he says. And so, this week, it was.
See images from Falapishi’s grand finale below.
