MIRRORED DREAMS
Arminée Chahbazian and Minami Oya
TINT Gallery
August 8 - October 4, 2026
The idea of art as a mirror to life is appropriately dual in nature: an objectively rendered duplicate reality is twinned with a distorted or disturbing one—the view into a funhouse mirror, or even a world of dreams and mysteries, as in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass, or the films of Jean Cocteau. In the French SUrrealist’s films, Death of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast, and Orpheus, mirrors—pools of shining water, filmed sideways—serve as portals into other worlds, both seductive and dangerous, according to the poet-filmmaker: “Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.”
Brought together for Mirrored Dreams are two Bay Area artists producing complementary artworks. Arminée Chaubazian, a multi-disciplinary artist born in Colorado, and educated at Yale and Scripps, has enjoyed a forty-year career spanning the eastern United States, France, and Holland. Minami Oya, born on the small, mountainous Sado Island, a paradise of wildlife set in the Sea of Japan, was educated at San Francisco State. San Jose State, PIlchuck Class School, Pittsburgh Glass Center, Corning Museum of Glass, and D.F. Glassworks in Murano, Italy, and now teaches glassworking.
Chaubazian is showing eight large graphite and colored pencil drawings on layers of paper and translucent duralar drafting film, to which she sews glass beads in intricate patterns, lending her dreamy imagery a jolt or reality, like rapports materialized from the ether during séances. Chahbazian’s poetic juxtapositions of natural motifs —clouds, birds, shadows, trees—all presented without obvious narrative connections—suggest photographic double exposures and the avant-garde cinema of a century ago (miraculously effective even today , despite their primitive technology), along with the Magrittean darkroom collages of the Californian Jerry Uelsmann, a half century ago, before Photoshop and the rest of the digital armamentarium.
The surprise effect of Charbazian’s unfettered floating objects may derive from Surrealist theories of dislocation and decontextualization, forcing the viewer to create his or her own interpretations, but these drawings read more as images creating arcane linkages than the Surrealist provocations of young Parisian intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The dripping honeycomb covering above the parched and cracked river bed in “Bee Gone” may refer to threats to the natural world—Begone!—but it also hints that, with moisture; life returns; and honey is immortal, in effect, as egyptologists can attest. “Eye of the Storm” carries a similar environmental message, with an orb which we interpret as the earth, engulfed in thunderhead clouds; a bird falls from the sky as if poisoned by the mephitic vapors of Avernus, a volcanic crater lake said by Romans to lead to the underworld, its emanations fatal overflying birds. “Float” depicts the strange encounter of an iceberg in placid waters, and a child’s balloon, still tied to a string, through which we view the iceberg; both objects are lighter than their surroundings and are supported by them—as long as they stay buoyant. “Phoenix Falling” depicts the American badlands of Western movies, replete with hoodoos and a chimney rock, with the outlined urban skyline below contracting with the dark silhouette of a predatory birds diving downward from the top.
Oya is showing ten small to medium-sized sculptures of hand-blown silvered glass spheres that capture their surroundings, including observers, in miniature worlds of infante reflections; imagine Lucas Samaras’ 1996 ”Mirrored Room” crossed with the crystalline spheres and polyhedrons in M.C. Escher’s metaphysical still lives, with their hints of the transcendent and mystical contained within a room of ordinary objects laid out on a tabletop.
If Chahbazian’s poetic scenarios, suggesting still photos from unmade movies, hint at transformation and metamorphosis, and even the consolations of mythology, Oya’s silvered blown glass sculptures transform virtuosic craftsmanship into philosophical games or game boards (“Energy Portraiture in Black and White No. 69,” ”Energy Portraiture No. 70,” “Emergence,” “Transitional Plane No. 2,” “Transitional Plane No. 4”). Think of the interpenetrating complementary black and white elements —birds, fish, reptiles, elves—that swarm across M.C. Escher’s prints (or prints within prints), locked into position by their perfectly complementary outlines. If games are one metaphor useful for Oda’s work, liquid dynamics is equally inescapable, with the frozen droplets, faultlessly rendered in gleaming, black and white glass and silvering, evoking, sensuously, the motion-studies scientists and photographers who shot bullets shooting apples and the like when strobe light enable ultra-fast exposures. Oya’s dualistic invites metaphysical mediations.
Chahbazian and Oda,complementary yet harmonious, prove that modest scale, a quiet minimalism, and a subdued, nearly monochromatic palette can create thoughtful, poetic effects that punch way above their weight class; that aesthetic limitations can stimulate creative growth.