Anahita Akhavan, Sarah Dinnick & Laura Findlay: What Remains

United Contemporary is pleased to present What Remains, a group exhibition bringing into dialogue the thoughtful practices of Anahita Akhavan, Sarah Dinnick, and Laura Findlay. 

Each of these artists offers a keenly observational eye to the unseen or overlooked. Weaving between night and day, interior and exterior, abstraction and figuration, past and present, they explore the residue that exists in these varying states of in-between, capturing the essence or distilled feeling of time and place into their work. 

Anahita Akhavan’s paintings draw on motifs and geometries found in Iranian textiles, architecture and ornamental gardens to conjure spaces that hover between the realm of the physical and metaphysical, memory and imagination. Operating more as an echo of forms than as a direct depiction, her work considers themes of absence and presence, longing and displacement.

In Sarah Dinnick’s intimate photographs, human presence is often mediated through the play of reflection, light and shadow. In this instance, she explores all that remains of a life that once was through a series of images of a home photographed from the outside looking in. As the surrounding landscape bleeds into the domestic interior, it captures a moment of profound connection where an individual’s interior spirit, dignity and grace are imbued with elements from the natural world.

Laura Findlay’s recent work explores the garden as a site of transition and tension. Imaged under the veil of nighttime, her paintings beckon the viewer into an uncanny environment, both familiar and unruly, where nature fills the frame and limits human interference to the periphery. Findlay’s rich painterly language is formed through subtraction, stretching the possibilities of pigment through gesture and removal. This reductive process unearths floral forms from the darkness of the painted surface, inviting a sense of possibility and mystery.