In her newest series of works on view now in New York, Tehran-born, Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Mahsa Merci unifies her signature sublimely tactile oil painting technique with hazy, dream-like gestures that disguise, transform and shift perspective.

Merci’s magnetizing portraits—which are part of an exhibition called Wet Light in Midnight put on by the Wolf Hill residency program that she just completed—are described by the artist as inscrutable self-portraits; yet, she explains further, they’re also incorporeal composites of the queer experience.

Through her enigmatic practice, Merci communicates the concepts of erasure and resilience by mining both personal and public matters. Her portraits act as a refracted mirror for the universal, yet diverse, experiences she has discovered by finding queer community in Canada and beyond. In the case of the work “Wet Light in Midnight (Artist’s Portrait),” I mean mirror quite literally, as here Merci’s painted figure stands boldly between two panes of painstakingly cut mirror shards evoking the gorgeously graphic Iranian glasswork made famous by the country’s mosques.

While she first embarked on her creative career as a graphic designer, Merci’s practice now includes sculpture, photography and drawing. But it’s her range of recent paintings that have been her preoccupation of late—the unimaginable hours spent crafting these striking scenes laden with oils so dense that each subject’s nose protrudes and their hairs stand on end, with some faces disfigured by increasingly confident swipes across each painting’s panel.

In working on them, Merci homed in on a new technique to amplify the themes of identity, self-determination and violent discrimination that are the undercurrent of her electrifying oeuvre.

After the jump, read our full Q&A where she shares more about her fearless practice, and how moments of ambiguity can still have power.

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