Vestige explores the body as a site of memory, cultural inheritance, and fragmentation. Painted during Kaviani’s residency at the Vermont Studio Center, these works bring together figures and forms cropped and redrawn from artists including Ribera, O’Keeffe, and Bernini, alongside personal references and observations. Through distortion and reconfiguration, the paintings move between recognition and abstraction, and between drawing and painting. They consider what remains when images, histories, and identities are fractured, and what lingers as a trace, a memory, or a vestige. Born to an Iranian family and raised in the West, Kaviani works within a Western canon that is not entirely her own, using borrowed bodies and inherited histories as source material. Reduced to a narrow tonal range, they remain raw, unresolved, and psychologically charged. Marjan Kaviani (b. 2002 Toronto, ON) holds a BAH in Studio Art and minor in Psychology from the University of Guelph (2024). She attended the Pouch Cove Foundation Residency and the Vermont Studio Center Residency on a full fellowship in 2026. Her work has received support from the Ontario Arts Council, the Guelph Arts Council and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2025).
