ARTICHOKE Magazine, SUMMER 1998
by Donna Mattila

Canada is a peaceful haven for expatriates from countries in political turmoil or plagued by civil violence. Here, artists and writers can tell their stories from a safe and distant perspective, but they live with the loss of home, language, and culture. While their stories and visual representations enrich Canada and provide us with personal insights into other cultures, they feel somewhat isolated in a new country that defines itself by diversity and thus lacks a cohesive cultural identity. One of these artists is Iranian-born Mehdi Naimi.

Sequence of Events, curated by Tony Martin, presents a portrait of Naimi's Iranian family history within the contexts of religion, revolution, and isolation. These paintings are inventions of an imagined reality, a redefinition of memories from the recent past, particularly the Islamic revolution of 1979. Family Picture is a mixed-media oil on canvas depicting a black silhouette of a family group with one of the members physically isolated by distance and visually isolated by kneeling rather than standing. The figures emerge out of a textured ground layered with Persian poetry. The calligraphic text acts as an abstract element, a veil of mysterious, unintelligible words.

An earlier untitled painting shows two black silhouetted figures and what appears to be a coffin. Here the text is in both Persian and French. This painting seems to depict the offering of a final farewell to loved one -- a child? a partner? -- and reflects an image of death and loss that could occur in any culture.

Self Portrait is a tripartite work composed of wood and assemblage. Beautifully painted and conceptually diverse, this piece refers to medieval paintings of Christ. In the first panel Naimi has painted a portrait of his head, in the second panel his hands, and in the third panel he has made four small sculptures of apples backed by a painting of apples. In the self-portrait, Naimi's eyes are covered with palm fronds and his mouth is tightly closed against a fly which has alighted there. The expression is pained, and the atmosphere is hot and dry. The hands are presented with palms upright, revealing stigmata, the marks of Christ's crucifixion. Where there should be blood there are cloth poppies; the manufactured remembrances of war. The sculptured apples are painted in warm tones of gold and red, and have been tasted. They are mirrored by a painting of green apples, which is perhaps a reference to Naimi's relocation to a northern land, or an allusion to the Garden of Eden and the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. Historical paintings of Christ show him reaching out for an apple, symbolically taking the sins of the world upon himself. In the secular realm, the spherical shape of the apple functions as a metaphor for the cosmos.

Sequence of Events presents graphic documentation of Naimi's life journey -- art as autobiography -- but his imagery extends beyond his personal vision and speaks to a larger audience.