Image credit: Erin Bloodgood
Email: nina2gh@gmail.com
Bio
Nina Ghanbarzadeh is a Wisconsin visual artist and an entrepreneur taking a universal approach to written language in her art. She emigrated from Tehran, Iran in 2001. Nina earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting, drawing and graphic design from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 2013 and completed a two-year Artist in Residency Program with Redline Milwaukee in 2015. In addition to participating in several group shows, Nina is the the winner of best in show in Wisconsin Biennial 2020. She received the Mary L. Nohl Suitcase Export Fund, Student Silver ADDY and Fredric R. Layton Foundations Scholarship awards.
Most recently, Nina launched ARTKee Educational Toys LLC, which produces SOFTwords, kits of basic shapes that allow children to explore the shapes as images as well as text. Nina draws inspiration for her educational toy business and her art from cultural differences and the limitations of language. She finds beauty in the abstract marks that make up the symbols for language and explores the possibility of peace, happiness and togetherness through the universal language of art.
Statement
Living between two cultures (American – Persian), I find myself in constant translation. Culture is so much more than language. It is a shared visual sensibility, humor, music, rituals, past times, food, spiritual commonalities, shared history and understanding. I draw inspiration for my art from all of this and from the limitations inherent in language. I search for the universal abstractions of lines, curves, dots that are the building blocks of the symbols that make any language and that help to describe a culture.
The absurdity and brutality of our world, drives me to find the underlying beauty in the abstraction of language and to explore the possibility of using universal marks to create art that bridges cultures, nationalities, or ethnicities – art that uncovers the commonalities we all share and respect –a reverence for life, time and peace. I use these universal marks in repetition to apply dual meaning to the symbols: one text and language and the other artistic and symbolic. My work has become quiet in its nature, devoid of blatant color and created using a repetitive and meditative process. The effect of which invites the viewer to meditate upon the marks themselves and their own place on the bridge of our shared human experience.