Where We Meet brings together the works of Dana-Haeri and AlShawi, two artists whose practices unfold as meditations on breath, memory, and the unseen harmonies that shape human experience. Through layered abstraction, both artists create spaces of felt presence, each approaching it through different pathways – Dana-Haeri through atmospheric and tonal reflection, AlShawi through embodied gesture and continuity.
Rooted in Persian poetry and Eastern philosophy, Dana-Haeri creates images that carry the echoes of myths and fluid stories – narratives that shift with time yet remain charged with unconscious emotion. Her layered surfaces of oil, acrylic, ink, and mixed materials build depth and complexity that resolve into a distilled simplicity. Canvas, paper, and wood become vessels where memories refract through color and texture, where the past is not fixed but breathing, alive within the present. Her tonal abstraction reflects cultural inheritance, creating a contemplative field that resonates beyond time.
AlShawi’s practice unfolds as an embodied inquiry into legacy, faith, and remembrance. Painting becomes vibration made visible, breath transferred into gesture. Layers of oil, oil stick, and pastel pulse between control and release; mark-making cycles through repetition and return, generating continuity.
Influences from Baroque light, Islamic art, and still life inform the structure and rhythm of her compositions. Floral subjects, often captured at moments of transformation, carry presence and passage through material process. Through vivid color, gestural movement, and the physicality of painting at large scale, AlShawi invites the viewer into a space where presence, transformation, and continuity can be experienced directly.
For both artists layering is not merely material but metaphysical. It is the accumulation of time, the sediment of story, the rhythm of breath. Their works exist in a space between stillness and movement, existence and nonexistence, memory and immediacy. Each piece functions as a living form: an encounter that bridges theory and practice, the visible and the felt.
A convergence of gestural abstraction and cultural inheritance shapes this dialogue. AlShawi’s work embodies legacy and bodily presence, while Dana-Haeri’s atmospheric surfaces reflect enduring resonance. Neither seeks representation; instead, they invite surrender to complexity and calm, to a conversation that unfolds within the viewer. Both are acts of courage: to sit with the self, and to invite the self to sit.
It is precisely in this shared openness that Where We Meet finds its meaning.
