Fatemeh Burnes is a political artist in the guise of a romantic dreamer. Now in her 60s, she immigrated to the US from Iran when she was 15, and her complex feelings about immigration, and emotional and physical displacement have never left her. This discomfort, coupled with her concerns about the environment, social unrest, the plight of women in contemporary society, and identity politics – and her desire for some kind of resolution – are at the core of her art. However, though her art begins with political sources, these direct references get swallowed up by her unconscious and instinctive movements arrived at through the art-making process, such that ultimately, if the original references are discernable at all, they have become camouflaged within a sea of painterly abstraction. Rather than literal representations of specific places, events or people, Burnes’ art seems to grow out of her empathetic responses and intuitive sensations, becoming dystopian worlds of sometimes optimistic evocative form. Shapes that might suggest actual objects or people emerge out of atmospheric landscape-like spaces as color glows and pulsates to an emotional rhythm of mixed media and paint. Burnes’ art, sometimes quiet, other times anxiously vibrating, is an otherworldly art of meditation, contemplation, and personal history that lets the viewer wander into interior worlds where the past, present and future, the wondrous and the horrendous, intermingle to create amorphous questions with no concrete answers. Fifteen panels of her current series of 197 panels – each representing one of the 197 countries where emigration is a pressing issue – along with larger pieces currently are on view at High Noon Gallery through June 1.