Artist: Mina Rezghian

Exhibition Title: I Carry You With Me

Exhibtion Dates: April 5-9, 2027

Reception and Gallery Talk: TBD

Bio:

Mina Rezghian is a Master of Fine Arts student in Studio Art, majoring in Painting at the University of South Carolina. Mina draws from personal memories, familiar objects, textiles, and materials such as printmaking, wood, and metal. Through painting and mixed media, she explores how memory can hold intimacy, distance, loss, hope, and healing, and how ordinary objects can carry the feeling of home and connection. 

Artist Statement:

Through my work, I try to give form to intimate emotions that words cannot easily hold: hope, resilience, fear, and loss. These are emotions that are deeply familiar to many Middle Eastern women, including myself. Growing up in Iran, I saw how women carried their strength quietly, often hiding their emotions behind patience and silence. That shaped how I understand resilience, not as something loud, but as something quiet and deeply felt. Painting provides a language when words fail to describe my experience. Figures, objects, and material forms hold moments of pain and joy at the same time. They show resilience and vulnerability, and become a record of how I live between two worlds. 

Objects, textures, and patterns play an important role in my work. In Persian culture, tea is more than a drink; it is a way of gathering and being present with one another. A teacup, a tablecloth, a piece of fabric, or the small details of a Persian carpet can carry memory, intimacy, and distance. I grew up surrounded by rose patterns; they were everywhere in our home, on dishes, fabrics, carpets, and small everyday objects. Roses were my mother’s and sister’s favorite, so they became a symbol of love, care, and warmth for me. These designs settled into my memory in a quiet way, almost without me noticing. When I use blue roses in my work, it is because the memory has changed. Blue holds both peace and grief for me; it reflects distance, longing, and the feeling of missing moments I cannot return to. These floral patterns carry my memories of home, and at the same time, the sadness of being far away. 

I can still hear my mother calling me, “Mina! Come here, let’s drink a fresh cup of tea with the cake I baked today!” I cannot relive that moment, no matter how much I want to. Moments, like people, come and go. Some have left my life, and some I may never see again. As an Iranian living far away, travel restrictions keep me from visiting those I miss, which makes these memories not only more valuable but also more painful. This longing for connection and memory motivates my experimentation with different materials and perspectives. I stain paper with tea, draw on broken teacups, work with wood and metal, and use scale, surface, and texture based on the feeling of each piece. I explore how textures, colors, objects, and figures can hold stories. 

Even my dreams have begun to shape my paintings. I once dreamed of walking through ruins and burnt houses, broken cars, even the remains of a shark’s head, until soft and floral colors began appearing and covering the destruction. A calm voice in my dream told me, “There is no hell after this road.” That sentence has stayed with me and became a question for my art: how do I show destruction and healing in the same space? How do I make something broken feel whole again? 

I am in a stage of discovery and exploration. I avoid limiting myself to one material or one way of storytelling. I search for the best way to make these moments feel real, connecting everything in my mind and bringing everything that hurts me onto the paper or into physical form. My goal is to let people feel my memories, to see themselves in them and to reflect on their own longing and connections to the past. What began with self-portraits is expanding to objects, spaces, textures, textiles and three dimensional forms that carry meaning. My work is a conversation between my past and future self, and those who stand before it.