Sofia Pashaei

The paintings in Sofia  Pashaei’s work are imagined scenes depicting one's relationship with themselves and with another. They show intimate relationships, friendships where time allows for a person to be the myriad of identities that they are. Relationships that start over a glass of wine at a table and continue days, months, or years later in a bathroom - the relationship and the place, more personal. They are narrative paintings; they show the passage of time and weave a story, not in the movement of the figures but instead in the change in architecture, in time of day, and in the objects that decorate the scene. The figures sometimes become part of the architecture themselves, a reflection of the awkwardness of trying to fit in.

Pashaei’s paintings take time. They make time, too. The calming, aesthetic certitude to her works does not mean they can be seen easily or quickly. Artistic choices and moments consistently and slowly reveal themselves. The line of a wall becomes the curve of a bowl, so seamless that you may not notice it until after having looked at the work for some time. A dining table becomes a bathtub, and night becomes day. A relationship goes from casual to cherished in one still image. The work is both about, and shows, the passage of time.

The smoothness with which she paints the transitions from a couch to a bathtub, or a windowsill to a table is a reflection of the way a person’s identity can be structured as many dissonant but woven ‘rooms’ at once. You are perhaps one person with family and another with friends. This identity splitting is particularly common amongst children of immigrants, or people from non-Western countries and cultures living in Western places. A person’s home is often a place where you can see most clearly and directly who that person is; it is the place that carries all possible identities at once. Pictures framed on a wall are windows into values.