Ochi Gallery is pleased to present Mythopoeia in Three Acts, a group exhibition on view from October 24th to December 19th 2020. Through varied explorations of the materiality, Aryana Minai, Claudia Parducci and Anna Elise Johnson’s practices contextualize everyday artifacts and experiences, abstract the phenomenology of the built environment, and engage in revisionist myth and monument making.
Rendering her paintings through collage, paint, plaster and sanding, Minai reveals the delicate edges where her memories transmute into layered surfaces, reminiscent of bodily architectures that are simultaneously sites of nostalgia, erasure and imagination. Parducci’s bronze cast ropes, some protruding from the walls, others slung over mounted worn wooden sawhorse handles– familiar objects cast in unfamiliar arrangements–linger as if to suggest an accident, an incomplete task, a morbid joke that the viewer isn’t quite in on. By casting the desert floor, or working with ash from an extinguished fire, Johnson creates earth-toned palates that tell stories of remnants–the works gesture towards the impossibility of creating an experiential index of the Anthropocene, of capturing an ephemeral lived moment within the limitlessness of nature.///
Aryana Minai engages with the memory of site with a focus on the built environment. Reflecting upon Islamic and vernacular architecture of her childhood in Iran, she crafts monoprints of geometric patterns on handmade paper. Her designs are guided by an organizational logic of modular flexibility, rather than rigid systemization. Forms migrate across the surfaces of supports, occasionally slipping out of sequence, past the edges, or atop one another. While utilizing bricks to emboss these permutations, the works themselves also become architectural. They extend from the walls and the ceiling to structure the movements of viewers’ bodies. Through the use of resin, several works function like translucent windows that simultaneously demarcate and bridge two spaces. Minai ultimately envisions architecture as a living entity that continually sheds and acquires memories as bodies pass through its spaces. Minai moved with her family to Tehran when she was five months old. The family returned to Southern California when Minai was fifteen and she subsequently earned a BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena (2016) and an MFA from Yale (2020). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Perrotin, New York; Arvia, Los Angeles, Ed Varie, New York and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.
Artists
