Sophia Anthony, Bix Archer & Aryana Minai: The Mind’s Eye
Make Room Los Angeles is pleased to present The Mind’s Eye, an exhibition of works that brings together Dallas-based artist Sophia Anthony, Los Angeles-based Aryana Minai, and New Haven-based Bix Archer.
The artists’ new works explore small interior moments that use serenity to examine the mind's internal processes. The show centers on memory as a place of worship where past experiences, emotions, and identities converge. The work draws inspiration from the concept of the “mind’s eye” and investigates memories as more than a collection of the past but as active, living spaces that inform our present and future beings.
Bix Archer (b. 1997) is an artist from San Francisco. Her practice consists of observational oil paintings of everyday life. Working primarily from direct observation and forgoing the use of a camera or digital tools, she plays with various ways of mediating and expanding visual experience, including working from memory and written observation, the construction of models, and collaboration.
Bix received her B.A. from Yale College and is currently an MFA candidate in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art, where she received the Dumfries House Fellowship in partnership with the Royal Drawing School. She is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation artist grant, and has exhibited work nationally and internationally.
Sophia Anthony (b. 1997, Dallas, TX) paints quietly uncanny scenes of domestic interiors, set amidst uncertain atmospheres and architectures. Combining elements of art history, cinema, and literature, her works synthesize different painting styles to create psychological tableaus that consider ideas of interiority and alterity.
Anthony received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2022 after earning dual undergraduate degrees from Southwestern University in Studio Art (BFA) and Physics (BA) in 2019. She has also studied at Tyler School of Art in Temple University and the University of Maryland. Recent solo exhibitions include Interior Motives (Ro2 Art Gallery, Dallas, TX); The Speaking Silence (DEASIL, Houston, TX); and Garden of the Laws (Sarofim Fine Arts Center, Georgetown, TX). Her work has also been part of group exhibitions at Logan Art Center (Chicago, IL); Stella Elkins Tyler Galleries (Philadelphia, PA); and the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX) and fair presentations at EXPO Chicago (Chicago, IL) and Dallas Invitational (Dallas, TX). Anthony lives and works in Dallas, TX.
Aryana Minai (b. 1994) Aryana Minai, an Iranian-American artist based in Los Angeles, draws upon the personal experience of living between two distinct cultures to explore broader issues surrounding histories of architecture, migration, labor, and the body. Referring formally to both the walled gardens of Iran and the pick-up truck beds of Los Angeles day laborers, Minai’s large-scale works on paper call into question the presumed permanence of architecture, the world-building potential of nostalgia, the inclination to find remnants of the familiar often under unexpected conditions. The process of creating pulped paper from found materials becomes analogical to the process of remembering and reconsidering through personal memory, a transformation of one form into another. Traces of the artist’s hand appear alongside imprints of bricks and stones culled from demolished buildings, vintage woodblocks used in textile design, wallpaper stencils, vestiges of places and aesthetic vernaculars that no longer exist, objects that can only be accessed partially, through memory. As contemporary art increasingly concerns itself with the global, Minai’s works transcend abstract concepts like “cultural hybridity” to suggest how social forces and historical circumstances actually manifest in both memory and material form.