Naghmeh Sharifi’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculptural installations, animation and digital media. Her interests are rooted in a fascination with the body – its psychology, its ability to be a place of memory, and as a shell for one’s presence in the world. Sharifi investigates the way bodies contextualize themselves in, against, engulfed in, or invaded by spaces they inhabit by using a variety of mediums. Through blurring borders, separating the figure and ground, Sharifi highlights at once the fragility and the agency of the body as a manifestation of critical cartography. She waters down and dilutes mediums to explore the hazy and uncertain places her figures navigate. A tussle between marking and erasure has become Sharifi’s most recent approach to image-making. Whether it is through un-painting; a way of constructing the final imagery through wiping the paint with solvents or erasing and adding one frame to the next, the artist ultimately questions how we would be read and how we might shape space for ourselves in the world if stripped of all context.
Naghmeh Sharifi is an Iranian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. She holds a BA in Visual Arts and one in Psychology from the University of British Columbia as well as an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University. Sharifi's work has been exhibited in Iran, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, United States, Canada and Macedonia. In Montréal, she has presented her work at several sites, most notably at the Phi Centre and the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels).
