appears in Daylight leaves in good time . So does a dragonfly she once spied. A nocturnal swim in Biarritz with friends inspires a spray of waves in Midnight swim . In this way, Zeinab’s primary source material is memory itself. But more crucially, its gaps and crevices, its instability and promiscuousness, its … grey. “I see a leg,” she says, while gazing at a painting. “I see an open mouth,” I say, looking at the same painting.
“I enjoy foggy days,” says Zeinab. Which sounds about right, since she lives in London. She tells me that a hazy day makes her more attentive, inspires a more active viewing of her surroundings. “You look more closely,” she assures me. Grey, she suggests, doesn’t occlude or obscure. It enlightens; it is revelatory. A little like standing under the moon(light).
**
Both, of course, are equally true.
I begin to think of Zeinab’s dense, enigma-filled surfaces as emotion-scapes, collisions of time and place, fragments of stories—real and imagined. Alternative landscapes, if you will, capacious and irreverent, the product of a sort of stripping down. An excavation of the psyche.
**
“We look at the world once, in childhood,” says the poet Louise Glück. “The rest is memory.”
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**
Water is a recurring trope in these works. Both translucent and opaque, placid and tempestuous. Always subject to moods. Transporting.
“The color of truth is grey,” said André Gide, and I find myself agreeing.
**
Negar Azimi is a writer based in New York. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the publishing and curatorial project Bidoun .
Aspen Art Museum
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