Naimah Amin is a visual artist based in Montréal, QC, working primarily in painting.
They hold a BFA from Concordia University and are completing their MFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.
I am currently interested in how landscape, floral, and environmental imagery carry colonial legacies of beauty, property, and ownership, and how these legacies continue to inform our relationships to land and to one another. Over the course of this summer, I have been reflecting on what it means to devote sustained time and attention to painting what I perceive as beautiful. What does it mean to immerse oneself in colour, form, and brushwork; to linger with a single moment, object, or scene drawn from the everyday urban landscapes shaped by diverse histories of migration, labour, dispossession, and resistance? What are the implications of such a practice of image-making, especially in a time so saturated with images of local and global violence and catastrophe?
The Western aesthetic canon has often tied flowers to bourgeois leisure or reduced landscapes to heuristics for so-called anthropocentric order. I reframe these images as part of a visual commons: beauty collectively held, rooted in everyday spaces where people of varied migration and labour histories pass through on unsurrendered Indigenous land. Clichéd objects I am drawn to—cornerstore bouquets, sidewalk blooms, cultivated flowers in manicured yards—compose this commons in ways that resist colonial logics of ownership and (in)accessibility. They invite me to consider: is aesthetic engagement an act of evasion, a romanticization of working-class life that risks reproducing the gaze of the bourgeois flâneur? Or might it instead articulate a concrete utopia, a generative space where the capacity and desire for beauty become catalysts for political thought and action?
To pursue these questions, I develop what I theorize as a decolonial sublime: an aesthetic mode that resists the transcendental distance associated with canonical Western formulations of the sublime (e.g., Kantian and Romantic traditions), emphasizing instead proximity and reciprocity. My paintings are often based on subjects I encounter while walking, or on the domestic spaces where household commodities become vessels for intimate portraits of friends and loved ones. I am drawn to the beauty of the mundane, to the way such moments summon memory and affect. Colours speak of the vibrancy and vitality of non-human life, while the stark illumination of flash photography foregrounds the human gaze. I work primarily with acrylics; its rapid drying yet enduring materiality embodies both speed and latency, aligning with my inquiry into how transient forms might be translated into sustained painted encounters, resisting the erasures of hasty consumption.
Upcoming group exhibition
MFA 2026 State of Practice Exhibition. September 18 to October 12.
MOEC Galleries, 520 E 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5T 0H2
Most recent group exhibition
Dwelling(s), curated by Luigi Pulido, Florence-Ariel Tremblay, and Jennifer Wood. March 5 to 12, 2025.
MOEC Galleries, 520 E 1st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5T 0H2
Most recent curatorial project
Takātuf: From Salish Seas to Palestine, curated with Maliv Khondaker and Quin Sluzalek. August 2 to 29, 2025.
Vancouver Black Library and Centre A Gallery, 268 Keefer St, Vancouver, BC V6A 1X5
Community organizing
Wretched of the Moon/Damné·es de la lune, with Wawa Li and Faith Paré, a Montréal artist collective fostering solidarity with prisoners through letter-writing and community learning initiatives for abolitionist justice.
Selected awards and grants
Audain Travel Award 2026
Bourse de maîtrise en recherche FRQSC 2025-2026
Mitacs BSI Award 2025
SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarships - Master's Award 2024-2025
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