CARLA Review
Does it Have a Heart, Does it Sing, Does it Sting?, September 10—October 22, 2022, Ochi Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
“Does it Have a Heart, Does it Sing, Does it Sting?” features molded, impressed, and deeply pigmented paper pulped sculptures and wall works that mimic the forms and poetics of architecture. For Aryana Minai, architecture is a body: “space is alive, has a beating heart, and pulsates memories.” Minai creates remembered and imagined spaces that are situated within the context of places and recollections that survive or don’t. An avid reader, “Does it Have a Heart, Does it Sing, Does it Sting?” references three of Minai’s favorite Iranian poems. Written to be sung, these translated fragments are combined to make a new diasporic framework.
Minai begins each artwork with kitchen blenders, creating a liquid pulp by mixing found paper with recycled water. Brick outlines on her studio floor are placed to determine the borders of an artwork—Minai fills these temporary plastic-lined shallow molds with a patchwork mass of strained and pigmented pulp. Once a brick-mold is full, Minai presses an array of objects into the surface of the pulp—creating patterns from parts of salvaged buildings, textile woodblocks, and other decommissioned artifacts that provide a link to generational and cultural histories. Small sculptural elements such as paper pulp hands, flowers, altars, and other biological or architectural motifs are added as needed. Though Rome wasn’t built in a day, Minai must complete each work during one epic and laborious studio session, predicated by drying times. Impressions of Minai’s fingertips are preserved like fossilized footprints that emerge from a lakebed during a drought. Embodying loss, bittersweetness, and nostalgia Minai embraces these human traces, aligning her sculptural process with geological time—fossils are but a stone’s memory of the bones of an animal.