Ario Elami:  Numinous Altars

March 12 through April 12, 2025

Artist’s Reception
Saturday, March 22nd
4:00 – 6:00 PM

Numinous: Something mysterious, supernatural, spiritual, awe-inspiring, and perhaps holy.

Altar: A table, as in early forms of architecture, used as the focus for a religious ritual, often for making offerings to a deity.

Bio

Ario Elami, is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts’ MFA program through Tufts University, a composer, author, and artist whose work explores architecture as the tension between human design and nature. Claiming dual citizenship as an Iranian and North American, he has spent much of his life on the east coast and in Michigan.

Elami works exclusively on paper in an often limited palette, with the resulting works resembling prints or bookplates. They appear to be timeless, as if found from a remote past in a secret library. Each piece resembles the type of anthropological or archeological drawings made to document temples, palaces, sacrificial sites, or necropolises found in jungles, and not fully understood by their discoverers. Elami, in depicting undefined architectural sites of relics or ruins, allows us to dream of uses both sacred and profane; to explore the tension between human design and nature on the verge of reclaiming its primacy. Elami’s latest art has developed in tandem with an understanding of the earliest architecture as numinous altars, and a perception of nature as a roiling mass of aggressive life, perpetuating itself through overabundance. In this vision, architecture manifested out of violent, spiritual rituals, externalizing what is internal. Elami sees architecture, revitalized with its primitive and mythopoeic qualities, as a portal back to a cosmos overflowing with meaning and mystery.

This program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.