Featured artists: Aiza Ahmed, Shyama Golden, and Aryana Minai

Organized by guest curator Donna Honarpisheh

Meyer and Chairmen's Galleries, Main Level

Portals explores the psychic, material, and spiritual states of life at the threshold. As a liminal and intermediary space, a portal is a channel between the earthly and divine, the conscious and the unconscious, as well as the material and dreamworld. In Persian, Urdu, and Arabic, darwazeh refers to a gate that reflects a spiritual point of transition. The paintings, sculpture, and installations included in this exhibition explore the idea of a portal as a physical passage, a doorway, a gate, or point of entry, while also referring to mystical and psychic passages via spiritual experience and the imaginary or dreamworld. Against a backdrop of diaspora and exile, the portals in this exhibition evoke experiences of loss and survival, mythology and the uncanny, as well as borders and boundaries. Through material and form each artist creates a multilayered sense of a portal that transports the viewer into another world.

Portals is organized by Donna Honarpisheh, Guest Curator