2025 MFA THESIS EXHIBITION
niloofar monfared

JANUARY 16 - FEBRUARY 14, 2025

My room, myself, what I observe through the window, and film stills set the stage in making my paintings and collages. I perceive the isolation of a moment of a film into a still, as a theatrical stage of its own. In this arrest of perception within the constraints of a still or within a section of my room, I find curiosity in shapes, colors, edges and composition. The unfoldment of my work allows me to be surprised by my ways of seeing, my ways of perceiving and this keeps me excited as a means of seeing myself.  
 
When working on drawings or paintings, I find myself in an amateur state of not knowing the how to, thus relying on perception when control is subdued by inhibitions of skills. This amateur state in my experience allows me to notice how I make the most of limitations and a departure from the original perception to an unexpected language of my perception. This amateur experience in making paintings, reminds me of my brief experience in taking images with a click and shoot camera, when I mostly relied on my ways of looking and framing, while having less control of functions, the resulting images were surprising and further away from my initial perception.  

While working on drawings and paintings, I seem to play with ‘importance’ as my attention reduces its frame of focus within a still. I might perceive the still in terms of lines, shapes or colors. In this, what is important shifts and varies at different moments. I explore this shift of significance through making iterations from the same reference. 

I seem to also consider the movement between positive and negative shapes, in which lies for me a kind of scrutiny of emotional closeness and distance. In a recent collage/painting that emerged from a dancing scene, what initially began as an exploration of a dancing scene, evolved as a dialogue with horizontal and vertical shapes. I explored motifs such as multiple figures next to one another, through their reduction to shapes. I am curious of the irrelevancy of these shapes to one another and their unexpected entanglements to each other. 

When collaging or painting, I seem to engage with this sensed notion of intimacy and distance. What is foreign and what is familiar?  What’s ordinary and familiar may become foreign when not spent time with. I explore this sense of foreign, in picking stills that seem ordinary or trivial in an attempt to find another familiarity.  

Niloofar Monfared is a newbie visual artist from Iran, now based in Iowa. Her work currently is focused on drawing, collage and painting. She holds an MFA degree from Maharishi International University (MIU) and a BA in Consciousness and Sustainability from MIU.  

Her focused studies in learning and practicing visual arts began in recent years since 2019 when she took directed drawing lessons with the generosity and mentorship of artist Jim Shrosbree. Prior to this, while having deep appreciation for art she mostly was exposed to it through film and music in her upbringing environment in Iran and through her few years of living in Malaysia and the US.  

As part of her BA program in MIU, Niloofar also took a digital photography and a video making class, a tip toe of her interest in learning visual languages. She finds that her fascination and studies in Maharishi Vedic science found a framework in expressing her inner dialogues, through drawing/painting.  
 
For her MFA thesis, she will be participating in the group exhibit with her classmates, that will show some of her works made during the MFA program.  

Along with her room space and herself as subjects of her drawings, she gathers different stills from films and music videos as references for making her work. She yet returns to and is moved by Morandi’s approach of a limited subject, as she explores working on iterations of paintings/collages. In this frame, her work perhaps engages in the exploration of cravings in a limited appearance.