Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to announce Soft Waters Heard Here, Los Angeles-based, Iranian artist Aryana Minai’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Presenting a new group of paper pulp paintings, Minai continues her investigation into the sensory dimensions of memory, reflecting on the details that define a place in our mind when we are no longer there. The show’s title is an oblique reference to the process of papermaking and its relationship to water (pouring, dipping, draining, leaking . . .) that informs Minai’s practice, as well as a suggestion for how the viewer should approach the work: listening for the sounds of distant waters.

“My absence has been an exile from an exile.” So remarks Etel Adnan, the late Lebanese painter and poet, near the beginning of a book of recollections too fragmentary to be called a memoir. Its title, too, is worth recalling here: In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. These thought figures, which revolve elliptically around the idea of home, seem to have offered Adnan a way of measuring distance along an axis of belonging and absence. When home is no longer a place that can be returned to, what becomes of its memory

Like Adnan, Aryana Minai is an artist with multiple origins. Born in Los Angeles to immigrant parents, she soon returned to Iran with her family, spending much of her childhood in Tehran before immigrating back to the United States as an adolescent. Minai channels this experience of moving between two radically different cultures, with their different notions of what constitutes home, into the compositions of her large paper pulp paintings, which reference the walled gardens of Iran while using the same dimensions as the pickup truck beds of Los Angeles day laborers. For Minai, these spaces are related to cycles of labor and rest in a way that allows them to function as metaphors for both mental and physical exertion. Pushed to the point of exhaustion, Minai asks, what kind of memory persists in the body

The paper pulp paintings on view in Soft Waters Heard Here embody the process of their own making. They are the arrested results of a technique that transforms paper into pulp and back again, with the artist’s hand literally impressed into the surface of the material, which records the traces of the labor that formed it: the artist’s hand, an outline of bricks arranged intuitively around floral motifs embossed with old woodblocks and handmade stencils mimicking the wallpaper patterns of childhood bedrooms. For Minai, the goal is to create an image that recalls the spaces she inhabited as a child but through a kind of alchemical resonance in which the memory of these places becomes strong enough to endure their destruction. This idea is pushed even further in the small panels which house the seed-like remnants of earlier works within an enclosure of skeletal leaves. 

Having been invested with a touch longing for home, Minai’s paper pulp paintings transform from topographical landscapes describing the nearly forgotten places of her childhood into mnemonic portals that, through a kind of dream logic, demolish the distance of time and momentarily restore to the world the innocence in which it was held: diaphanous fields of color behind grids of brick and floral pattern. In the recent protests that gripped Iran, women fighting for the simple freedom to live their lives raised a slogan that has served as a lodestar for Minai in her work: You may have burned our gardens but we still carry the seeds. Seeds that will grow where the ground is made fertile.