Los Angeles based artist Aryana Minai’s paper based wall reliefs explore architecture as an intimate, bodily, and imaginative space shaped through memory, care, and making. Rooted in the handmade, her work considers how environments are built not only through structures and labor, but through softness, protection, and rest.
In her new body of work, Minai departs from the saturated pigments of earlier pieces. Rather than dyeing the paper pulp directly, color emerges through the slow, offset absorption of pigment from stained drop cloths used in previous works. These cloths carry the residue of earlier gestures, allowing whites, pale pinks, and muted blues to surface gently across the reliefs. The process introduces a quieter palette that reflects both material memory and emotional tenderness, as past works quite literally imprint themselves onto new forms.
Minai was raised in Iran, where her childhood bedroom functioned as a carefully constructed world. It was a place shaped by her mother’s labor and imagination. Hand painted wallpaper, a flower patterned curtain sewn and designed specifically for the space, and small domestic details transformed the room into a site of safety, play, and dreaming. This bedroom became an architecture of protection, a place where rest and sleep made imagination possible. For Minai, world building began there.
The works call back to earlier seed forms from her Life Forms and Nest series which reference the women’s life movement in Iran. Those seeds now find their way outward, evolving into three dimensional floral structures embedded within the reliefs. These flowers are formed from fragments of iron gates collected in Los Angeles, molded and softened through paper pulp. Materials associated with hardness, enclosure, and protection are transformed into delicate, blooming forms. What once functioned as barriers become sites of growth.
Paper remains central to Minai’s practice as a carrier of storytelling, tradition, and touch. The surfaces of the works are built through bricks and stones from buildings that no longer exist, woodblocks passed down through generations, fragments of vernacular decorative architecture, and the repeated presence of her fingertips. Architecture is understood as a living body, one that accumulates memory through use, erosion, and care.
At their core, these works are about rest. They ask what it means to feel safe enough to sleep, to dream, and to imagine new worlds. For Minai, dreaming is an act of construction.