Sara Rahmanian (b. Tehran, Iran) gives unexpected dimension to banal objects to address the strangeness of time and contemporary life. Her paintings defamiliarize scenes of the everyday—warping proportions, enlarging features, and flattening are key tools in her repertoire of gestures—while an interest in posthumanism creates a fluid visual vocabulary that integrates figuration and abstraction. Demonstrating a commitment to humor and creativity, each canvas creates an unsettled viewing experience that invites audiences to reconsider the true knowability of the self, objects, and place.

Rahmanian’s paintings begin with an unremarkable arrangement: a plate of food on the table, a glowing iPhone screen, hair tangled in a brush. But the natural course of memory is distortion, and it is through the entwined acts of remembering and painting that Rahmanian captures the weird weightiness of the material world. The shadow recurs across the artist’s body of work to suggest an identity crisis or a more general sense of elusiveness. For Rahmanian, who moved from Tehran to Connecticut in her twenties, the solitary aspect of diasporic experience lends itself to a deeper contemplation of her surroundings and belongings. This attunement creates a painterly sensibility that emphasizes duality: everything is held within nothing and vice versa.