Roxana Vaziri

Roxana Vaziri paints in a small studio in Toronto, working from a folder of photographs relatives in Iran text her — a cousin's wedding, a nephew's school photo, a grandmother at a stove — images she has often never seen in person. She overlays two or three faces on one canvas at a time, letting features drift and merge until a single portrait carries traces of several people who have never met each other. She keeps the source photos pinned beside the easel throughout, so the blur is deliberate rather than a failure of memory. Vaziri has not returned to Iran since she left as a child; the paintings are, by her own account, the closest she gets. Her work is produced and shipped from her Toronto studio.

Roxana Vaziri paints from memory and photographs sent by relatives still in Iran — portraits that blur a single face into something closer to a map.

London

That a face built from several relatives' photographs can hold a family together more than any single portrait could.