Aryana Minai at OCHI

Aryana Minai, DOES IT HAVE A HEART, DOES IT SING, DOES IT STING? (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and OCHI. Photo: Deen Babakhyi.

In DOES IT HAVE A HEART, DOES IT SING, DOES IT STING?, Aryana Minai’s solo exhibition at OCHI in Arlington Heights, body, memory, landscape, and architecture collide. While her paper pulp works appear as static objects, hung neatly along the gallery walls, they are the product of an embodied, performative process. Each work is created in one laborious studio day, during which the artist blends paper and water (subversively repurposing the kitchen blender) into a soupy pulp before straining and spreading it into a temporarily assembled brick-lined mold on her studio floor. Minai then impresses this soggy mass with architectural artifacts—like broken-off pieces of gates and buildings culled from her Los Angeles neighborhood—to create subtle 3-dimensional shapes in the work’s surface before it dries. The chromatically muted, heavily-textured, impressionistic surfaces that emerge stage a poetic mash-up of imagined and real architecture drawn from Minai’s diasporic upbringing. Her ghostly works read as dreamlike exteriorizations of the concept of “home,” a space the artist sees as located within us—embedded into memory and sedimented into identity.

Born in the United States to Iranian parents, Minai returned to Iran with her family when she was three months old, creating a fragmented sense of self that she reflects on in a short video shared on OCHI’s Instagram account. Minai speaks of the desire to fold these fractured, diasporic identities into something that might resemble a whole, if only temporarily.¹  Paper pulp, too, can be continually reshaped and reconstituted, a process she enacts in the studio. The bodily aspect of the work extends beyond the physical labor of creating it; body and landscape (or body as landscape) are invoked through the texture of the prints themselves. Their dried-out surfaces become a kind of variegated skin, harkening back to the embodied nature of home, which is both within us and enfolding us, at times as a dermal layer, at others—made visible by the tight rectangular geometry that encases Minai’s works—as a cage. The title of Embodied & Embedded II (all works 2022) speaks directly to the bodily dimension of the work, while the print itself, reminiscent of a drought-afflicted landscape, bears finger-like impressions in a spectrum of browns, oranges, purples, and blues.

Minai reproduces distant architectural iconographies through the literal impression of locally-scavenged building fragments. Vertical and horizontal lines are delineated with the impressions of actual bricks, and spirals from gates form decorative floral motifs. These indexes of architecture reference a broader cultural imaginary. Though the prints avoid imitating a specific style, the loosely arabesque outlines they depict nod to the vocabulary of Islamic architecture. Works like Chest below the rubbles, Brother’s Arch (diptych), To be held, I felt it, A growing pain, and All I needed play on the form of the arch, at times depicting arches within arches, or arches that serve as platforms for small rocky objects. Portals I, II, and III likewise share the same structural elements: 84 by 48 inch rectangular surfaces framed by horizontal and vertical lines of impressed brick that create a symmetrical geometry inscribed with repetitive decorative patterns. While the prints range in color and are imprinted with unique variations of ornate architectural moldings, they each bear further brick impressions that form a house-like shape at the top of the composition. This enclosure of a domestic shelter recalls both the psychological and lived-in space of the home.

For diasporic subjects, “homeland” is a fraught concept, leading to its own form of architectural poetics drawn from disparate topographies. If home is a space we once lived in and now carry within us, Minai’s works return it to a new material form through a performative bodily process. These diasporic architectural poetics are only ever fragmentary, pieced together from many homes, as is made evident by the use of locally-sourced objects in the artist’s Los Angeles studio to reimagine the shapes of another homeland. The structures that emerge are ghostly and dreamlike as memories; they can no longer cradle or cage us as real homes do—but, like an incantatory spell, perhaps they can release us from home’s perennial hold.

Aryana Minai: DOES IT HAVE A HEART, DOES IT SING, DOES IT STING? runs from September 10–October 22, 2022 at OCHI (3301 W. Washington Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90018).

Aryana Minai, Brother’s Arch (diptych) (2022). Dyed handmade paper, soil from L.A., and red ochre from Hormuz, 84 x 96 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and OCHI. Photo: Deen Babakhyi.

Aryana Minai, Portals I, II, III (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and OCHI. Photo: Deen Babakhyi.

Aryana Minai, Portals I (2022). Dyed handmade paper, 84 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and OCHI. Photo: Deen Babakhyi.

Aryana Minai, DOES IT HAVE A HEART, DOES IT SING, DOES IT STING? (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and OCHI. Photo: Deen Babakhyi.

Aryana Minai, Chest below the rubbles (2022). Dyed handmade paper, 19 x 15 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and OCHI. Photo: Deen Babakhyi.

Vanessa Holyoak is an interdisciplinary writer and artist based in Los Angeles. Her art writing focuses on installation, sculpture, and image-based practices. She holds a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts and is a PhD candidate in Comparative Media and Culture at USC. Her criticism has appeared in art-agenda, BOMB, East of Borneo, and Hyperallergic, among other publications.

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