Zoom-in to a virtual artist talk with Homa Khosravi, BIPOC Studio Award Winner and Aiden Kirkegaard Griffin x ECU Studio Award Winner. Khosravi and Kirkegaard will discuss the work and research conducted during their time at Griffin!
Homa Khosravi, (b. Tehran, Iran) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, She received her MFA from Simon Fraser University and BFA in Painting from the Tehran University of Art. Her work touches on surrealism, abstraction and worldbuilding with various “more than human” creatures through a multitude of mediums, including painting, video and sculpture installation. Khosravi explores the human body and its connection to memory, fantasy and the uncanny, highlighting a foundation of humor found within. Khosravi investigates experiences of her body and mind in relation to her environment, vis à vis the process of making the artworks, the choice of colours, and materiality within the installation.
Khosravi’s residency explores her personal representation of the Persian garden and the underlying politics behind the situation in the Middle east. She situates gardens as spaces of mediation, leisure, and care, and yet simultaneously act as spaces of contention to ask: who is given access to these coveted spaces? How would these spaces look when it's empty of humans, when the strange creatures take over the gardens, animals are the main characters and carriers of the message.
Aiden Kirkegaard is a painter working in Vancouver and a recent 2024 MFA graduate from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. As a painter, Aiden’s work explores how the physical and material processes of painting can elicit memory and dreaming. Painting for Aiden becomes a mode in which she accesses personal memories and imagines alternative realities. The actions of mixing acrylic paint, engaging with colour, building shaped canvases and putting brush to canvas all encompass a process-based approach to making.
During her time at the Griffin, Aiden intends to refine her practice through a continued exploration of shaped canvases and acrylic paint. Embracing painting as her primary medium, she will devote significant time to expanding her formal understanding of the genre, including an examination of color, painted marks, architecture, and acrylic paint/mediums. Considering how paint behaves is an integral part of her practice and this will also drive her time in the studio at Griffin Art Projects.