Solo exhibition
Opening on September 25, 6-9 pm

“The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer.’’ Gaston Bachelard

Echoes brings together painting, print and an immersive audio-visual installation to explore folklore and the fantastical—a melding of stories and worlds, through the spectral presence of voices that persist across generations. 

At the center of the exhibition thrones Fading Fables, an audio visual installation that creates a fragmented environment where memory, myth, and disappearance slip between states. Sharifi uses drawing as a storytelling vehicle, by showing timelapsed sequences of moving images, which were sketched, erased and redrawn indefinitely. A reimagining of a traditional Iranian folktale, Fading Fables is recounted by the artist’s late grandmother. Sharifi’s grandmother’s fragile voice is transformed into both an archive and a metaphor for the resilience and vulnerability of oral traditions in the face of erasure.

The story follows Zar-Afshun, a young woman whose quiet life is disrupted by a mysterious serpent leaving gold at her spinning wheel. When fear drives her to strike the creature, it reveals itself as a prince in disguise—setting her on a perilous journey of devotion, crossing enchanted landscapes and facing trials of love, illusion, and endurance.

The surrounding paintings extend this inquiry into the world of fairytales as untapped realms of our subconscious. Figures who surface and dissolve in enchanted landscapes allude to Sharifi’s continued investigation and attempt to register folklore into a visual language of the fantastical. Fading silhouettes conjure spaces where boundaries between human, landscape, and spirit remain unsettled, recalling the mythic worlds sustained through oral storytelling.

Together, the works in Echoes refuse a single, linear narrative. Instead, they embrace fragments, echoes, and spectral traces. The exhibition pays homage to matrilineal storytelling traditions, imagining technology as a contemporary form of oral lore. It creates a space of possibility, magic, and transformation, carrying forward the oldest impulse of human culture: to tell stories.

© Tannaz Shirazi (Natourstudio)

Naghmeh Sharifi is an Iranian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Tiohtiá:ke / Montréal. Formally trained as a painter, her practice now extends across drawing, installation, photography, and time-based media, evolving in response to her expanding explorations.

Sharifi’s work investigates the body as both a site and a vessel of memory—personal, cultural, and ancestral. She is drawn to thresholds between presence and absence, reality and imagination, considering how identity is shaped, obscured, or transformed across time, space, and language. Techniques of layering, un-painting, and erasure become tools for examining fragmentation—both in memory and in form—while also evoking the emotional texture of diasporic experience.

Sharifi holds dual BAs in Visual Arts and Psychology from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University (2018). Her work has been presented internationally in Iran, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Macedonia. In Montréal, she has exhibited at the Conseil des arts de Montréal (2015), Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (2017), MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) (2018), and the Phi Centre (2020), among other venues. She has also participated in several residencies, including the Impressions Residency at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Phi Centre’s Parallel Lines Residency, and the RBC Maison d’Ariane Residency.