Date: January 23 – February 22, 2018
Location: Asian Centre (1871 West Mall) (map)
Hours: Asian Library open hours (see hours)

Visit the Asian Centre foyer in the New Year for a new art exhibit featuring artworks by a UBC Asian Studies alumni.

About the exhibition: Summoning the Senses

Summoning the Senses is a multi-media exhibit inspired by eighteen months of academic exchange and personal travels throughout India which aims to incite curiosity, encourage adventure, and bring vibrancy to winter’s wetness using sculpture, paintings, textiles, and unique modification of space with miscellanea. The heart of the display, an optically illusory mosaic sculpture made with thousands of spice seeds, has a mesmerizing allure rooted in the structure of mandalas and is centrally painted with Islamic geometric techniques. In the context of a wanderer’s eye passing through the kaleidoscopic Indian subcontinent, the exhibition ornately explores its diversity, the significance of the environment as it pertains to shaping agriculture and culture, and attempts to capture the dynamic process of learning and understanding through an abundance of senses.

About the Artist: Amy Ebrahimian

A recent graduate of UBC’s Asian Area Studies program, Amy Ebrahimian has nurtured a passion for visual arts alongside her education and is thrilled to be sharing her work with the students, staff, and visitors of the Asian Centre. Of German-Ukrainian heritage and raised in both the United States and Canada, her family has been on the move for several generations and the wandering rootlessness she has maintained has taken her across continents while studying (perhaps why it took a little more than eight years to complete her Bachelor’s degree). Her artistic practice is guided by a desire to cultivate and communicate an understanding of nature that can both expand the observer’s respect for its value and their motivation for its protection. Her process is a balance of free-flowing and systematic unfolding to depict natural elements, symbiotic relationships, and cycles in terms that are honest and relatable with a hint of the mystical. Joyfully compelled, she produces pieces in realistic, impressionistic, and abstract styles using scenery from firsthand encounters and dreams. Enlivened by the act of telling detailed stories and (un)tangling concepts, much of her current work features intricate arrangements of minutiae integrated with intense colour palettes into oil and acrylic, and is accented by a topographic maze of textures that tempts the eye into exploration.

To learn more about the artist and her works, please visit www.mehndinomadic.com or Instagram @amy_ebrahimian_arts.