Biography

Aryana Minai (b.1994) 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 mono-prints 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).