On the Scene with artist Kamran Samimi

Kamran Samimi’s father came to the United States from Iran. His mother, born and raised in Minnesota, traces her ancestry back to Norway and Sweden. They raised Kamran and his brother in Laupahoehoe on the Big Island. Kamran’s imagination was stimulated by the rural environment. Art became the outlet for his imagination.

Samimi earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2010 and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and print media from the UH-Manoa in 2016. His work has been exhibited in Tokyo and on the mainland, as well as in solo exhibitions locally.

Samimi, 36, is in the final days of his residency at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design. An exhibition of his recent work is on display at the Honolulu Museum of Art through Aug. 15. A second exhibition is scheduled to open at Shangri La in March. See his work at kamransamimi.com.

Your residency at Shangri La continues through the end of this month. Can people come to see you at work?

I’m still down there but (Shangri La) isn’t open yet. The exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art is work from the first half of the year (at Shangri La). It’s open for in-person viewing now.

What about being an artist-in-residence stands out most?

I’ve had the opportunity to explore facets of myself, my identity as someone of Persian ancestry, that I’ve thought about and considered in my whole life but haven’t directly made artwork about. Working at Shangri La has encouraged me in a very natural and intuitive way to think a lot about that part of my identity, the spiritual center that I have, and where it comes from.

You’ve described your work as the “visualization of change and transfer.” Would you explain that please?

The artworks on display at the academy visualize change and the passage of time. Change doesn’t look like anything in particular, so I’m creating visualizations of change. The brushstrokes — black ink on white canvas — are synchronized with exhaling of the breath, and so it’s this process of marking time and experiencing time, each breath being a moment of life that I will never get back. Each brushstroke is a moment of my life that I put on the canvas, so it’s a meditation on mortality.

How do you approach working with rock?

In the first few sculptures, I measured and I planned very carefully ahead of time, and then I made the cuts and then I looked at the pieces of the stone and I thought, “Where did the life go? Somehow I’ve robbed this stone of its essence, of its life force.” What I do now is I look at the stone, I feel the stone, and then I cut where it tells me to cut. It’s intuitive but it also is connecting to, and honoring, the material. That’s really important to me, because my ideas come to me from explorations of my own personal connection with nature and my environment.

Does that go back to growing up out in the country on the Big Island?

A huge part of who I am and the way I work is because that environment made its way so deeply into who I am. The only way I can work is by exploring that connection.

What is something about being an artist that people might not know?

You don’t ever clock out. When I’m going on a hike I’m looking at the world through an artist’s eyes and so I’m working. Part of my practice is focusing on the dark side of existence and then translating that into something that I find beautiful or brings me peace, or makes the world a little bit nicer place to live — for me, and hopefully other people.