From a rich field of references that includes illuminated manuscripts and historic Persian literature, Pardiss Amerian produces paintings that easily bend between representation and abstraction. Likenesses simultaneously emerge and dissolve before your eyes from the carefully layered ground of each painting. In some ways, Amerian works like a translator, receiving historical narratives and recontextualizing their components, producing an uncharted elsewhere for viewers to wander. While these narratives are interwoven with the materiality of contemporary painting, they also insist on a dialogical understanding of storytelling and its visual representations. Indeed, these stories are part of living traditions that continue to resonate and be reimagined.
Pardiss Amerian (b. 1990, Tehran) is a painter currently based in Montreal. Her practice is a process-based exploration of painting and collage driven by narrative asides as a way to address temporality, transhistoricity, and the lyric potential of an imagined elsewhere. Recent exhibitions include KWAG (Kitchener-Waterloo) Jack Hanley Gallery (New York) and Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, ON). Her work has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council. Amerian holds a MFA from Concordia University (2022) and a BFA from OCAD University (2015).
