Semantics opened Namaz Khaneh (house of prayer in Farsi) on Saturday, January 8; the first solo show by promising young Cincinnati artist Sheida Soleimani. The permanently semi-finished gallery space at Semantics serves as a good venue for this work which consists of a series of images showing the artist's own roughly completed small-scale constructions. The greenish yellow tone of the walls of these small tableaux almost perfectly match the weathered yellow tone of the galley walls, providing a clear path for the visual allegories constructed by the artist to unfold effortlessly before the viewer. The stories which take place in these images are at first glance abstract or fantastic. Arms stretch out from the middle of a wall, chairs are strung to the ceiling and preserved animal specimens including snakes and scorpions are pinned in crude fashion within each space.

Without further clues, these images could be nothing more than the remains of particularly abject child's play. However, there is just enough further information provided by the title and accompanying artist statement to lead the work in an entirely different direction. These are stories from the childhood of Soleimani's mother – a political refugee from the Iranian Revolution in which the country became the theocracy it remains today. These stories have been transformed, some more literally than others into crude three dimensional forms and converted again into two dimensions by the camera. The rough edges of these tableaux – marks left with scissors around cut paper, unfinished pencil drawings on floors and back walls – reads like the gap between generations – we are literally made of the stories and experiences of our parents, but can only grasp them crudely, remotely.