Laguna College of Art + Design

My current body of work explores notions of mortality, vulnerability, loss, and survival. Over the last decades, these ideas have shaped my emotional landscape and have led to an investigation of the psychological and physiological circumstances tha…

Holding Still and Letting Go captures powerful personal emotions and intimate experiences and transforms them symbolically as universal expressions for the human condition. The themes in this collection are based on two profound periods—during…

My artwork often reflects an inner world that can be described as “Synthetic Realism.” Robert McKee, a former art professor at Yale University, used the label to loosely describe a form of art that although rooted in realism, manipulates…

The formal elements of my work respond to conflicting visual dualities in water. Water is a substance that can be both transparent and opaque. It allows its mysteries to stay hidden, or to loom eerily beneath its glassy surface. Realism defines thes…

Our ethics, logic, and aesthetics are highly dependent on the environment to which we belong. In one community such as a country, family, ethnicity, or generation, people may hold beliefs that feel like “common sense” to the people who b…

My experiences, memories, dreams, and ideas are externalized and made lyrical through my oil paintings on canvas. I respond to motifs and subjects from art history, and this body of work is especially informed by the Baroque period and artists inclu…

The culmination of this body of works is centered on my experiences. The paintings of this series follow the story of my life at this time in the past and the present. I want to depict places and people that mark a specific time and place in my life…

Steven Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, in The Grand Design, coined the term “model-dependent realism”, claiming that everything we know about reality is from observations based on models. They believe that different world picture models pr…

My work defines and explores the concept of floral life-cycles as a metaphor for human existence. I draw inspiration from my personal garden, which I cultivate for research purposes, as well as other natural spaces. This closeness to floral life-cyc…

Artistic evolution is highly personal and unique for each person. As a formally trained illustrator, I’m intrinsically afraid of change and desperately hold onto processes that feel familiar. However, I know that growth is full of risks and un…

Passive-Aggressive is a series of six drawings and six paintings that focus on voyeurism and repressed male fantasies. It should also be seen as a kind of visual diary that records two years of struggle, trial and error in a post-graduate painting p…

I think of my paintings as an extension of street photography. The photograph has had a long-standing tradition of being at war with the painting world; however, I found that it is used in my work beyond the traditional means of reference, and is so…

As a painter who hunts, my art concerns the dialectics of hunting. How can I say, “I love deer” while I am in pursuit to shoot one? Why is it that I am both remorseful and happy when I stand over an elk whose life I cut short? Where is t…

My paintings move through the shadow of my past life. I was born and grew up in post-revolutionary Iran, in a culture dominated by patriarchal governments and households. As a young woman in Iran, I saw wars, protest, and revolution. My early experi…

In this thesis, I question, reflect on, and navigate the cultural and societal challenges women face in Iran through my oil paintings. I create visual narratives with archetypal imagery depicting women's multifaceted experiences. Using symbolic imag…

My aim is to make strong, memorable images that invite the viewer to participate in a narrative. The narrative is a means of expressing emotions and meaning and allows freedom in the interpretation of ideas. Passage explores themes of traditional fa…

For me, the word “artist” is interchangeable with the word “seeker.” I see myself as having been on this path for a lifetime, and what keeps me moving forward—adding skills, learning theory, studying history, observing …

Meta-Figures is a series of paintings using the human figurative form as a means of expressing the subconscious. These singular figures and faces are created from my imagination using an intuitive process where one mark leads to another. The fo…