At once familiar and alien, landscapes are at the core of Aghbashian’s work. They seem to have been the theater of chaotic events left in a state of disturbing yet peaceful silence. An uncanny feeling is felt as one identifies with these anthropomorphic landscapes that speak of a fantasy place. In her paintings, flat parts of the landscapes or ‘cut-outs’ allude to kids’ pop-up books, reminiscent of Aghbashian’s childhood, and turn the two-dimensional surface into a skillfully layered one, populated by sculptural ruins. These images seem suspended in an in-between state, frozen after the occurrence of otherworldly phenomena, all the while propelling the viewer in a surrealist, sometimes futuristic dimension devoid of human life, as life itself has come to inhabit and animate the eerie landscapes. Time is not represented, it is perceived, as Aghbashian blurs all boundaries. She delves to understand the overlap and intersection of different narratives and explores the ambiguities of our times. As she builds up her paintings in layers and sands them back down, some remain transparent, others become dense, some blur, expand and shrink, get wiped, ever evolving and coexisting.
