THELMA Exhibitions: Vera Scekic & Nina Ghanbarzadeh

Vera Scekic

“My art practice is an analog response to developments in the life sciences that are enabling alterations to the genomes of a range of organisms, including humans. It is also an argument for the relevance of painting in a digital era and an endorsement of the medium’s ability to reflect human experience and identity through time.

Adopting the visual culture of biology as metaphor and armature, I treat paint as if it were an organism, exploring its material, chromatic, and formal properties using a process that combines chance occurrences with a systematic approach. My methodology is time-intensive and relies on continuous experimentation with paint and thinning agents; pouring, peeling, sanding, and layering; and an ongoing dialogue with my preceding works.

In biology, “recombination” occurs when genetic material from disparate sources is combined, either naturally or in the lab, to create new DNA, proteins, and organisms. This process parallels the way I create my paintings: by repeatedly inserting chance into a rules-based strategy while reintegrating elements from prior paintings (paint membranes, contours, and scans of paint pours, deconstructed surfaces) into new works.

As each painting develops, it becomes a meeting ground between abstraction and the petri dish—as well as a record of my negotiations between opacity and translucency, surface and illusion, past and present, expansion and containment, and contingency and control.”

Vera Scekic lives and works in Racine, Wisconsin. She has exhibited her artwork at galleries, museums, and art centers throughout the U.S. Recent solo exhibitions include Recombination at Arts + LiteratureLaboratory (Madison, WI) and Synthetic Being at the Contemporary Art Center (Peoria, IL). Scekic is the co-founder and director of OS Projects, a contemporary art gallery in downtown Racine, WI, and a founding member of ArtRoot, a grassroots organization that builds arts infrastructure and connections within Racine’s creative community. Scekic also writes art reviews and is a current contributor to Newcity Chicago.

Visit https://www.scekic.com to learn more about this amazing artist, and come see her work in person May 16 – June 27, 2025!

Nina Ghanbarzadeh

“Living between two cultures (American–Persian), I find myself in constant translation. Culture is so much more than language. It is a shared visual sensibility, humor, music, rituals, pastimes, food, spiritual commonalities, shared history, and understanding.  I draw inspiration for my art from all of this and from the limitations inherent in language. I search for the universal abstractions of lines, curves, and dots that are the building blocks of the symbols that make any language and that help to describe a culture.

The absurdity and brutality of our world, drives me to find the underlying beauty in the abstraction of language and to explore the possibility of using universal marks to create art that bridges cultures, nationalities, or ethnicities – art that uncovers the commonalities we all share and respect –a reverence for life, time and peace. I use these universal marks in repetition to apply dual meaning to the symbols: one text and language, and the other artistic and symbolic. My work has become quiet in its nature, devoid of blatant color and created using a repetitive and meditative process. The effect of which invites the viewer to meditate upon the marks themselves and their own place on the bridge of our shared human experience.”

Nina Ghanbarzadeh is a visual artist who emigrated from Tehran, Iran, in 2001. She earned 
her BFA with a double major in painting, drawing, and graphic design from the 
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 2013 and completed a two-year AIR Program 
with Redline Milwaukee in 2015. Nina is a 2024 Mary L. Nohl Fellow in the Established 
Artist Category, the winner of best in the show in the Wisconsin Biennial 2020, and received 
the Fredric R. Layton Foundation’s Scholarship. She is also a teaching artist and has 
been involved in many workshops, lectures, presentations, and critiques.

Recent focus in her work has been the intersection of text and image, and the potential 
of using text to create movement and texture.

Visit www.ninaghanbarzadeh.com to learn more about this amazing artist, and come see her work in person May 16 – June 27, 2025!