By NATALIE SACKET
Feature Editor
She sits perched on the arm of a couch in a spacious, secluded room in Jesse Dunn. Cluttering the room are scraps of paper, tape and string: materials that will soon be transformed into an artistic masterpiece.
Roeya Amigh is the current artist in residence at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. She has come a long way from her hometown of Khuzestan, Iran.
Amigh articulately communicates her passion for art, her thick Iranian accent coating her words like she coats her creations with glue.
“I knew I wanted to be an artist when I was in middle school,” Amigh said. “That was the only thing that could make me happy. I remember when I was a kid and if I got mad at something, I would go to my room and make drawings.”
Amigh’s parents recognized her artistic talent when she was quite young.
“My parents really encouraged me to be an artist,” she said.
Amigh has dedicated the next few months to developing a body of artwork while at Northwestern. While here, she will conduct workshops and presentations. Feb. 5, Amigh debued in Alva with a presentation at The Graceful Arts Gallery. She will present a culmination of her work on April 1 at the gallery. Amigh knew about the residency because of Kyle Larson, who serves as the assistant professor of art. The two studied art while attending Boston College together. The pair graduated from there in 2012. “It’s nice to be able to see his work and he see mine,” Amigh said. Larson said,” For the last six years I have been fortunate enough to see Roeya’s artwork evolve and change as she consistently pushes her work further, often in unconventional ways. Her inclusion of history, literature and poetry, while exploring her own personal narratives is an example of the development of a living and breathing body of work. Amigh describes her aesthetic as “making something from nothing.” She uses inexpensive materials, such as glue, string, fabric, paper and wood to create installation art pieces. “To make my work, I need to spend hours and hours and hours,” Amigh said. “It’s a very tedious way, the way I work. I make inexpensive valuable.”Amigh spends much time on her work; she creates her work with painstaking detail.
“When I start a piece, my process begins in a tedious and slow manner,” she said. “I render a large quantity of small drawings by gluing many small bits of thread together … I’m very interested in lines. That’s why I started using thread, because it gives me different lines … I borrow text from the myths of the phoenix, dragon and the Daeva as written by the Persian poets Rumi, Ferdowsi and Hafez and imagery from Persian miniatures. I cut many triangles of fabric. Then I incorporate structural elements of fabric and wood and connect the drawings with these materials. I use every element in my work to create a different line.”
Amigh finds inspiration for her art in many different places and through different experiences. “I am motivated to make work that resembles the set of a play or a synthetic epic,” she said. “My work intersects my identity as an Iranian woman in relation to society’s constructs and mythologies.”
She is inspired by other painters, including Goya and Matisse.
Amigh said, “I generally use mythology, but the inspiration comes from my experience living in the states, my experience living in Iran and how I am expected to act as an Iranian woman.”
She said she looks forward to the inspiration that Oklahoma will bring her, as she has never visited this state before.
“I was very interested to see Oklahoma, because I love being involved in different cultures and meeting new people,” Amigh said. “Always, that inspires me for my work. I’m going to use more earthy color, because of the palate I see here. It is a very earthy palate.”
Amigh has not always focused on installment art. Originally she was a painter. She began working on installation art and mixed media in recent years.
Amigh graduated from the Science and Culture University in Tehran with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2007. After this, she earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from Central Azad University in Tehran in 2010, and an MFA in painting from Boston University in 2012.
Amigh has participated in several prestigious residencies in past years, including the ArtHub Residency in Kingman, Arizona; the Drop Forge and Tool Residency in Hudson, New York; the Contemporary Artists Center at Woodside in Troy, New York; the League Residency at Vyt in Hudson Valley, New York; the Can Serrat Art Residency in Barcelona, Spain; and the Elsewhere Studios Art Residency in Paonia, Colorado.
To view more works by the accomplished Amigh, visit http://cargocollective.com/roeyaamigh.