Setareh Shahbazi’s projects often begin with photographs: images from collections, snapshots taken by the artist, family photos, film stills, postcards and newspaper clippings. With a playful irreverence to the sanctity of a photograph as a mirror of reality, Shahbazi drains details out of images. Using digital manipulation, she breaks down images into visual components, and seamlessly reorders what she extracts into new compositions that are at once familiar and strange. Ancient, classical and modernist structures sit side by side with depictions of birds, foliage and family members, muddling our sense of time and place and activating our imagination to suggest the possibility of infinite narrative variations. Shahbazi's work is both a very personal universe and yet, she repeats and develops an idiosyncratic elements that becomes almost a code or an invented language.