Maryam Amiryani / Jen Mazza

NADA Miami 2024, Booth: B-206

December 3—7, 2024

Ice Palace Film Studios, 1400 North Miami Avenue, Miami, FL 33136

Ulterior Gallery presents two painters: Maryam Amiryani (b.1967, Shiraz, Iran) and Jen Mazza (b.1972, Washington D.C.) at NADA Miami. For Amiryani, it will be a return to this fair after a successful presentation in 2022, while for Mazza, this will be her art fair debut and her first introduction to this region in her almost thirty-year career.

Throughout her life, Amiryani has adapted to a variety of sociocultural and environmental landscapes in Paris, New York and Marfa, which she experiences as diaspora after her family left Iran during the revolution in 1979. For NADA Miami 2024, she will present a grid of fifty new oil paintings of sea shell titled Shelter.

Shelter derives from the artist’s fascination with the varied architectural structures of shells and their relation to livability and the environment. Amiryani is specifically concerned with the landscape surrounding her current home in the Chihuahuan Desert, which reminds her of what she remembers of Iran, and its geographic history. For her, the vastness and sweeping winds of the Chihuahuan Desert feel like a broad seascape, echoing the history of the land, which was submerged under a vast ocean 300 million years ago.

In this series, sea shells serve as mementos of past lives, worlds and environments that continue to change, while also reflecting the pure beauty of the world. Amiryani’s grid of paintings utilizes an archeological-like mode, applying critical distance to her study of memory and one’s relation to land: Amiryani says, “Through examining shells, I feel oddly connected to the geologic history of my dry landscape.”

Jen Mazza will showcase a selection of figurative paintings including her 2004 series, Nuit Blanche, which represent an incredibly significant moment in her life and work. This series marks the transitional moment when she is shifting away from depictions of the landscape that had been her prior focus. Mazza instead began painting and drawing women's bodies, often using her own body as model. “The Nuit Blanche series was deeply important in the development of my work. The materiality of the figurative painting crosses over directly into my current practice, as does a subtle sense of disruption—queering—as both noun and verb, I am always trying to embody something in terms of this otherness.” In these paintings, Mazza, who came out as queer in 2000, embodies a subtle dissociation by using her left hand and its mirror image to reenact what at first seems to be a first-person perspective in which two hands and arms adorned in kid gloves* engage in performative acts.

The gloves, acting as a second skin, protect animated ligaments while simultaneously restricting their gestures. The pearls and white leather that cover contorted arms suggest a mode of hiding in plain sight that leverages opacity. Yet, exposed flesh tones peak through the disguise, offering a vulnerable glimpse into the reality underneath. In this work, which conveys the conceptual continuity and growth of her practice over the past three decades, Mazza depicts the act of wrestling with one’s self, and renegotiating the possibilities of past and future.

*gloves made of soft leather, also a figure of speech for careful and delicate treatment of a person or situation.

Maryam Amiryani was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1967. Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Amiryani and her family relocated to Paris, France. Several years later, she moved to the United States, where she completed her education, obtaining a MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, New York, NY, in 1995. She also holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, and a BS in Asian History from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Amiryani lives and works in Marfa, TX. Amiryani's painting will be included in an exhibition at The Bunker Artspace in Palm Beach, FL, opening December 7, 2024.

Jen Mazza was born in Washington D.C. in 1972. She received an M.F.A. from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2001, and is currently based in New York, NY. A committed educator, as well as an avid thinker and writer, Mazza finds her inspiration across a range of disciplines which include philosophy, literature, and visual culture. Mazza’s work has been recently exhibited in a mid-career retrospective at The James Gallery at the Center for the Humanities, as a digital project for Artist Alliance Inc., and as part of her recent talk on art and nature at the Getty Museum. Mazza’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Art News, and Hyperallergic. Her first solo exhibition with Ulterior Gallery is scheduled to open in January 2025.

NADA Miami 2024 Viewing Room