Aryana Minai

Ochi is pleased to present Does It Have a Heart, Does It Sing, Does It Sting?, a solo exhibition of new work by Aryana Minai.

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 recycled, shredded paper with 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, parts of gates from her neighborhood in Los Angeles, 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.

Aryana Minai (b. 1994, Los Angeles, CA) makes paper-based sculptures and wall works that are intimately linked to philosophies and histories of architecture, migration, labor, craft, and the body. Minai received her BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2016 and her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2020. Minai’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Craft Contemporary, Ochi, and Steve Turner in Los Angeles, CA; Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, CA; and Galerie Perrotin and Ed. Varie in New York, NY. Her work has been featured in publications including artnet news, LA Weekly, Whitehot Magazine, and Arte East. Minai lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Ochi in Sun Valley, ID and Los Angeles, CA.