Newcomer
For Newcomer: Quand la peinture sort du cadre et que le cadre se fait œuvre, two women artists of different backgrounds and generations met around their shared experience of immigrating to Quebec. Iranian-born artist Mina Hedayat uses painting to express her feelings as a newcomer to Canada. Her impressions, beliefs and childhood memories are the basis for a dialogue across cultures. The process of adapting to the host society is a resource for hybridity, as evidenced in her recent paintings. The laboratory ends with an exchange between the artists and the public. This exchange is an opportunity to take stock of the mentorship residency, which was marked by questions concerning contemporary visual expression, immigration, and divergent feminisms.
Mina Hedayat’s paintings are ecstatic combinations of traditional techniques and modern approaches, sparking dialogue about craft’s role in contemporary art. She combines colours and motifs in a way that includes the viewer in recollections linked to her own cultural background, childhood and family. The works that make up her most recent series, Newcomer, combine two different creative gestures: Hedayat first collects paintings from second-hand shops and then proceeds to transform the original images—a good example of her hybrid process. The personality and comfort that her works exude are due principally to her use of textiles and motifs and to their inherently tactile qualities.
