Naz Rahbar

Naz Rahbar was born in Tehran Iran in 1983. She immigrated to Canada along with her family at the age of thirteen. Following her passion for narrative drawing, Rahbar finished her studies at OCAD University in 2009, majoring in drawing and painting, with a minor in printmaking. Rahbar continued her studies in the arts by receiving a bachelor of Education specializing in Fine Arts at York University in 2012. She currently lives and works in Toronto as an artist and art educator.
Rahbar’s work explores the concepts of home, memory, longing, belonging, distances, and the negative spaces in between; quite often autobiographical, about the dilemmas of one’s identity, and existence in relation to others as well as one’s surroundings. Rahbar’s work in The Third Space exhibition at Tirgan 2013, will include a series of works on paper, which she began to develop during her thesis year at OCAD University. Here, miniature figures traverse the page, allowing the artist to explore the figure’s relationship to space and to one another. Rahbar’s project examines how a small mark can activate a space, what the negative space on a page might suggest, and the role of the figure in a place. Tracing back to her elementary and middle school years in Iran, these pieces tell abstract stories of distances traveled by plane and sensed in everyday life.