Aryana Minai

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

My work is about the relationship between rest, protection, memory, and the spaces we construct to hold ourselves and others. I make paper-based wall reliefs that draw from architecture, landscape, and domestic space to think about what it means to feel safe enough to sleep, dream, and imagine a future. My understanding of these spaces comes from my childhood in Iran, where my bedroom, shaped through my mother’s labor and care, became an early model for how architecture can offer both physical and emotional protection. I approach building as an act of care and dreaming as an act of construction. Paper is central to how I explore these ideas because of its ability to absorb, hold, and transform. I press paper pulp against stained drop cloths from previous works, allowing residual pigment to absorb into new reliefs so that past works physically imprint themselves onto new ones. I also use woodblocks from Iran to impress patterns and forms into the paper, bringing another material history into the surface of the work. Fragments of iron gates collected in Los Angeles are embedded into the reliefs and softened through paper pulp, transforming structures associated with enclosure and defense into architectural and floral forms. Through these processes, materials from different places and moments are brought together to carry memory forward. Seed-like forms recur throughout my work as forms of safekeeping and possibility. They first emerged as I grappled with how to support the...

Artwork