text by Hannah Sage Kay

Pulped paper bricks chart a haptic course between Aryana Minai’s eight Life Forms (all 2023) on view at James Fuentes’ lower-level project space. This rather soft, somewhat squishy pathway opens onto the wall under each Life Form for a reflective pause—during which their material simplicity and repeated compositional structure nevertheless conjure a mysterious world of color, and texture, that enshrines, within decay, seeds of new life. 

When pressed into a thick mess of pulped paper on a wire screen, a discarded textile woodblock from Tehran produces the architectural configuration undergirding Minai’s intimately scaled vignettes. In a rich array of browns, oranges, muddy blues, purples, and an unexpected chartreuse, the water-based dyes that Minai mixes with recycled paper in a blender to create pulp rise to the surface with an effervescent luminosity that remains even after the water has evaporated and the paper dried. Amongst the low-relief pattern left behind by the woodblock, a central archway frames the translucent skeleton of a rubber plant leaf from the artist’s mother’s garden. In the hollow pocket of this orifice are remnants of torn paper collected from the floor of Minai’s studio—the veritable seeds of her work; predicated on use and reuse, growth and decay, they take on a dual significance. Not only reflective of the binary cycles of her material processes, the seeds also allude, however subtly, to family, home, and the charged state of women’s rights in her native Iran. The exhibition’s title similarly speaks to a slogan adopted by the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement: You may have burned our gardens but we kept the seeds! 

These visual and metaphorical allusions may be evident to some and obtuse to others, so it is rather Minai’s poetic material configurations, her imbrication of architectural and illusionistic space, her threading through of specific cultural morphologies into broadly accessible and yet deeply personal terrain that proffer an ensnaring mystery and, as such, sustained investigation.

Roses In A Garden of Ruins is on view through October 14 at Allen & Eldridge (James Fuentes project space).