Annemari Vardanyan: Inside My Mind

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition titled Inside My Mind by Prague-based artist Annemari Vardanyan. The exhibition will feature eight large-scale unstretched paintings on canvas stapled directly to the walls of the gallery, as well as four medium-sized canvas works. Originally from Armenia, Vardanyan’s works depict quotidian scenes of life as a student—at home in her bedroom, with groups of fellow classmates hanging out, or simply a wall with windows in her home. These psychological portraits explore the spaces between uncertainty and place, and between alienation and hope. A recent graduate of The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague this will be Vardanyan’s first solo exhibition. 

The paintings in Inside My Mind illustrate the artist coming to terms with her own identity. Often the works depict the same figure in different positions in the same room. Vardanyan discusses, “I have always had the strong feeling that a person’s identity should come primarily from their inner individuality, from the realm of the most intimate experience, which gradually has the potential to reveal to us the horizon of broader social, historical, cultural, and political contexts.” As time past living in the Czech Republic, Vardanyan realized that her new home would become part of herself, however through her paintings she depicts subtle references to her homeland. Armenian iconography such as carpet patterns that dissolve into the curtains are depicted in the works. The installation of the unstretched canvases themselves is a reference to a mode of hanging carpets, in addition to a means of envisioning a larger work and expanded narrative. For Vardanyan that expanded narrative is not just one of her own life and continued development of self, but also an acknowledgment that while her personal experience has and can still feel isolating, it is in fact human—reflecting that her emotions have been and are felt by many others.