The Mind's Eye: Bix Archer, Sophia Anthony, Aryana Minai

Make Room Los Angeles is pleased to present The Mind’s Eye, an exhibition of works that brings together Dallas-based artist Sophia Anthony, Los Angeles-based Aryana Minai, and New Haven-based Bix Archer. 

The artists’ new works explore small interior moments that use serenity to examine the mind's internal processes. The show centers on memory as a place of worship where past experiences, emotions, and identities converge. The work draws inspiration from the concept of the “mind’s eye” and investigates memories as more than a collection of the past but as active, living spaces that inform our present and future beings.

Sophia Anthony uses oil painting as a camera lens to fabricate film-like shots of memory. She reinterprets found imagery from film stills and digital photographs to create layered compositions of liminal moments between acts. Her work evokes the psychological tension of fragmented narratives and dives into the complexities of identity and memory. 

Aryana Minai creates paper-based wall works that intertwine themes of architecture, migration, labor, and the body. Minai uses pigmented paper pulp to create architectural forms that are informed by her Iranian-American heritage. These wall sculptures create a garden of her memories, the plants filled with her personal history, and cultural identity. They inspire a longing for home and her past.

Bix Archer’s work investigates the interplay between memory, digital culture, and solitude in domestic spaces. She captures the way a body imbues its surroundings with energy through time. Archer reconstructs intimate interior spaces from aged memories, collapsing multiple moments together into single images creating ethereal layers of remembered space.

These three artists delve into the sacredness of personal history using the physical and metaphorical spaces of one's memories. Their works collectively underscore the idea of these spaces as a sanctuary, a revered space of preserved personal and collective histories. Through their distinct practices, the artists construct metaphorical temples within their works that invite viewers to contemplate the sacred spaces of memories and their role in shaping the perception of our world.

The Mind’s Eye invites viewers to traverse these sacred spaces created by the works of Anthony, Archer, and Minai: Through their practice, we are encouraged to reflect on our own internal landscapes, considering how memories serve as both personal altars and collective touchstones in our ongoing journey of self-discovery and cultural understanding.
--
About Artists

Sophia Anthony (b. 1997, Dallas, TX)  paints quietly uncanny scenes of domestic interiors, set amidst uncertain atmospheres and architectures. Combining elements of art history, cinema, and literature, her works synthesize different painting styles to create psychological tableaus that consider ideas of interiority and alterity.
Anthony received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2022 after earning dual undergraduate degrees from Southwestern University in Studio Art (BFA) and Physics (BA) in 2019. She has also studied at Tyler School of Art in Temple University and the University of Maryland. Recent solo exhibitions include Interior Motives (Ro2 Art Gallery, Dallas, TX); The Speaking Silence (DEASIL, Houston, TX); and Garden of the Laws (Sarofim Fine Arts Center, Georgetown, TX). Her work has also been part of group exhibitions at Logan Art Center (Chicago, IL); Stella Elkins Tyler Galleries (Philadelphia, PA); and the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX) and fair presentations at EXPO Chicago (Chicago, IL) and Dallas Invitational (Dallas, TX). Anthony lives and works in Dallas, TX.

Aryana Minai (b. 1994) Aryana Minai, an Iranian-American artist based in Los Angeles, draws upon the personal experience of living between two distinct cultures to explore broader issues surrounding histories of architecture, migration, labor, and the body. Referring formally to both the walled gardens of Iran and the pick-up truck beds of Los Angeles day laborers, Minai’s large-scale works on paper call into question the presumed permanence of architecture, the world-building potential of nostalgia, the inclination to find remnants of the familiar often under unexpected conditions. The process of creating pulped paper from found materials becomes analogical to the process of remembering and reconsidering through personal memory, a transformation of one form into another. Traces of the artist’s hand appear alongside imprints of bricks and stones culled from demolished buildings, vintage woodblocks used in textile design, wallpaper stencils, vestiges of places and aesthetic vernaculars that no longer exist, objects that can only be accessed partially, through memory. As contemporary art increasingly concerns itself with the global, Minai’s works transcend abstract concepts like “cultural hybridity” to suggest how social forces and historical circumstances actually manifest in both memory and material form.

Bix Archer (b. 1997) is an artist from San Francisco. Her practice consists of observational oil paintings of everyday life. Working primarily from direct observation and forgoing the use of a camera or digital tools, she plays with various ways of mediating and expanding visual experience, including working from memory and written observation, the construction of models, and collaboration. Bix received her B.A. from Yale College and is currently an MFA candidate in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art, where she received the Dumfries House Fellowship in partnership with the Royal Drawing School. She is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation artist grant, and has exhibited work nationally and internationally.
-
About Make Room Los Angeles
Established in 2018, Make Room is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Emilia Yin. The newly relocated 4,500-square-foot gallery is situated in the heart of Hollywood and includes multiple exhibition spaces, an outdoor courtyard, and a garden. The gallery’s dynamic program champions emerging artists, many of them female, with a particular emphasis on artists of the Asian diasporas. In both its physical gallery – which features solo and group exhibitions – and its ambitious off-site projects with international collaborators, Make Room supports its artists’ visionary projects and the development of new bodies of work. Since its opening, Make Room and its programming has been featured extensively in leading arts and news publications, including Artforum, Artnet News, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz, the Los Angeles Times, Office Magazine, Ocula Magazine, the Observer, Purple Diary, and the Financial Times, among others. In 2022, Emilia Yin was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30, highlighted as a new force in the contemporary art world. 

For media inquiries, please contact carina@makeroom.la