About ⋅˚₊‧ 𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅
Naimah Amin is a visual artist based in Montréal, QC, working primarily in painting. They hold a BFA from Concordia University and are completing their MFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
“I was born in 1997 on unceded land known as Tiohtià:ke in Kanien’kehá and Mooniyang in Anishinaabemowin. I was raised in a region the Abenaki call Ktinékétolékouac, where the Census would characterize the South Asian population as a lone speck of snow in an endless field of Francophone white. I grew up in cramped apartment complexes surrounded by concrete, asphalt, and plastic waste, with the internet as my only third space. I cherished rare trips to the countryside, taking in vast fields of ochres and verdant expanses of forest—moments of reverence only accessible when gas prices allowed. These aesthetic experiences not only sparked my desire to become a painter but also shaped my questions about my relationship to space, to place, to land, and to its peoples as an arrivant or a postcolonial settler.My practice is driven by a desire to examine hegemonic ways of seeing within a culture of immediacy and consumption. I am currently interested in how visual articulations of space through landscapes reflect (neo)colonial constructions of the “natural” world, as evidenced by commercial and user-generated imagery found on tourism websites and consumer mapping platforms like Google Maps. My paintings are personal responses to the Western landscape tradition, aesthetic paradigms of which are embedded in liberal philosophies that piloted violent colonial projects and racialized economic systems we continue to navigate today.
Painting disrupts the rapid circulation of images in a world of immediacy and hyperaesthesia. By translating these fast-moving images into painting, I impose an aesthetic distance that formalizes place into landscape, recontextualizing what is otherwise consumed without pause from the endlessly saturated, omnipresent visual commons. By painting referentially, I draw new meanings from the familiar, inviting a dialogue about translation, mediation, and the ways images shape and texture our understandings of landscapes. As I primarily work in acrylic paint, my paintings incarnate through its properties both speed and latency of plastics’ lifecycle—a ubiquitous material that epitomizes contemporary petrocultures and capitalist ethics of consumption and abandonment.”
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