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 in Vancouver, BC.
© Perrin Grauer
I am currently interested in how landscape, floral and environmental imagery carry colonial legacies of beauty, property and ownership, and how these legacies continue to inform our relationships to land and to one another. Over the course of the past year, this inquiry has involved sustained reflection on what it means to devote prolonged time and attention to painting moments embedded in the quotidian that solicit pleasure and mobilize desire. What does it mean to immerse oneself in colour, form, and brushwork; to linger with a single moment, object, or scene drawn from the everyday urban landscapes shaped by diverse histories of migration, labour, dispossession, and resistance? What are the implications of such a practice of image-making, especially in a time so saturated with images of local and global violence and catastrophe?
The Western aesthetic canon has often tied flowers to bourgeois leisure or reduced landscapes to heuristics for so-called anthropocentric order. I reframe these images as part of a visual commons: beauty collectively held, rooted in everyday spaces where people of varied migration and labour histories pass through on unsurrendered Indigenous land. Clichéd objects I am drawn to—cornerstore bouquets, sidewalk blooms, perennials in manicured yards—compose this commons in ways that resist colonial logics of ownership and (in)accessibility. They invite consideration of whether aesthetic engagement functions as an act of evasion—a romanticization of working-class life that risks reproducing the gaze of the bourgeois flâneur—or whether it might instead articulate a concrete utopia: a generative space in which the capacity and desire for beauty become catalysts for political thought and action.
To pursue these questions, my practice develops what I theorize as a decolonial sublime: an aesthetic mode that resists the transcendental distance associated with canonical Western formulations of the sublime (e.g., Kantian and Romantic traditions), emphasizing instead proximity and reciprocity. The paintings are frequently grounded in subjects encountered through walking, as well as in domestic spaces where household commodities become vessels for intimate portraits of friends and loved ones. Executed primarily in acrylic, the medium’s rapid drying yet enduring materiality embodies both speed and latency, aligning with this inquiry into how transient forms might be translated into sustained painted encounters that resist the erasures of hasty consumption.
Most recent group exhibitions
MFA 2026 State of Practice Exhibition. September 18 to October 12, 2025.
MOEC Galleries, 520 E 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5T 0H2
Dwelling(s), curated by Luigi Pulido, Florence-Ariel Tremblay, and Jennifer Wood. March 5 to 12, 2025.
MOEC Galleries, 520 E 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5T 0H2
Most recent curatorial project
Takātuf: From Salish Seas to Palestine, curated with Maliv Khondaker and Quin Sluzalek. August 2 to 29, 2025.
Vancouver Black Library and Centre A Gallery, 268 Keefer St, Vancouver, BC V6A 1X5
Community organizing
Wretched of the Moon/Damné·es de la lune, with Wawa Li and Faith Paré, a Montréal artist collective fostering solidarity with prisoners through letter-writing and political education initiatives for abolitionist justice.
Selected awards and grants
Audain Travel Award 2026
Bourse de maîtrise en recherche FRQSC 2025-2026
Mitacs BSI Award 2025
SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarships - Master's Award 2024-2025
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