Borderless

Fatima Garzan, Breeze, 2018, collagraph, cotton thread, 57" x 42", $1,200. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Fatima Garzan, Murmur, 2018, collagraph, cotton thread, 30” x 21”, $400. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Fatima Garzan, Aqua Bends 1 (Belonging), 2018, tube wrapped with print from woodcut and cotton thread. Size variable, $400. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Fatima Garzan, detail: Aqua Bends 1 (Belonging), 2018, tube wrapped with print from woodcut and cotton thread. Size variable, $400. Photo courtesy of the artist.


Project Space
Borderless
Fatima Garzan
February 15, 2019 – March 16, 2019

Fatima Garzan’s multidisciplinary art practice includes painting, printmaking, and site-specific installations. Through these various media, she explores pattern and abstraction as it exists within diverse cultures. Having trained in both Iran and Canada, she strives to mix influences from both eastern and western cultures, while investigating ornamental and modern design in her work. She combines decorative and geometric patterns found in Persian art and modifies them towards abstraction. This experimentation and deep engagement with different materials allows her to push her ideas forward and evolve her visual vocabulary.

In her art, Garzan uses thread to stitch papers together. The thread represents human connection. Some threads are intertwined with each other and others are cut off and knotted again, heading in a different direction. The act of stitching signifies the experience of migration, time, distance, memory and absence, which is shaped by an increasingly globalized world.

Fatima Garzan is a Kitchener-based artist. She was born in Tehran, Iran and immigrated to Canada in 1992. Fatima had a BA in Economics and studied Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo where she received her Honours Bachelor of Arts in 2005. Garzan’s art practice spans across painting, printmaking, and installations. She experiments with reclaimed materials, and her work evokes cultural traditions and the power of re-using and recycling materials in an increasingly congested world. Garzan has exhibited in Canada and Iran. She has completed artist residencies in Salt Spring Island, BC (AiR program) in 2017 and L’AiR ARTS international artist residency Paris, France in 2018. She has work in the Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Kitchener, the University of Waterloo prints archive, and various private collections. She was one of the founding members of BOX, a regional art show showcasing local artists in Waterloo Region.