
BRAIN TERRAINS
DIGITAL ART
Brain Terrains is an ongoing body of work. It is a wandering, quixotic expedition through the common intersection of interiority and exteriority, that is each one of us. By recombining medical imaging of the body and satellite imaging of the planet, the works expose landscapes with a common visual lexicon across scales.
Title
Brain Terrains, 2015 - ongoingMedia
Archival digital prints on various media and backlit lightboxes.Artist Statement
Combining public domain medical imagery – CT scans, MRIs, X-rays – and satellite imagery from NASA’s Earth Observatory, the Brain Terrains project traverses the commonality of our inner and outer geographies.
Exhibition History
Tag Gallery, Los Angeles, CA - Honorable mention, 2018 California Open
Private collections, Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles, Malibu
Private collection, University of British Columbia
Private collection, THNK School of Creative Leadership
BIC Art Collection, McConnell Brain Imaging Centre, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University.

Deloitte Greenhouse
Large-scale Installation
This multi-panel art installation was commissioned by The Deloitte Greenhouse in Toronto. The Greenhouse leverages behavioural science, analytics, technology, and facilitation to offer innovative programming that helps project teams tackle complex challenges. Its immersive environments are designed to re-examine conventional thinking, spur creativity, and foster breakthrough solutions.
The large-scale wall installation works to shift frames of reference for clients engaged in the Deloitte Greenhouse programming. The title of the work - 'what is this?' - is also a zen koan and the work helps catalyze an open-minded engagement in the discovery of uncommon solutions.
Title
"What is This?"Media
Archival Digital Prints face-mounted on acrylic panels. Vinyl wall mural and decals.Dimensions: 8′ x 8′ (approx.)
Artist Statement
The installation, part of the artist’s Brain Terrains series, explores notions of self and identity through the overlapping domains of micro (human body) and macro (planetary body). The installation consists of 10 face-mounted acrylic wall panels that invite viewers to reflect on the construct of an Interstitial Self as a composite of personal and external influences.We all have two sides of ourselves –
what we are for others and what we are for ourselves.
For others, we are a person –
for ourselves, we are space for the world.
Richard Long.
In merging medical and satellite imagery, the artwork highlights the interconnectedness of the human and planetary bodies, locating the Self somewhere and nowhere along the spectrum of our interior and exterior domains. The work encourages viewers to reimagine their place in the world and question their relationship with their shifting identities.
Central to this artwork, and the title of the piece, is the Zen Koan “What is this?” Koans are designed to provoke deeper thought and insight by challenging conventional thinking. Incorporating the Zen Koan What is This? creates a sandbox for curiosity and enquiry. The question invites viewers to contemplate the nature of perception and encourages continuously renewed wonder. This reflective process aligns with Deloitte Greenhouse’s goal of re-examining established perspectives to foster innovative thinking.
For more, visit the Brain Terrains at Deloitte Greenhouse
Exhibition History
Permanent Installation at Deloitte Greenhouse Toronto. 2024.
Inner-Selfies@AGO
Hybrid Public-Engagement
Inner Selfies at the Art Gallery of Ontario was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a grant from the Canada Council's Digital Strategy Fund. The interactive project explored online public engagement for museums and was workshopped at Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Design's Interaction Lab.
Inner Selfies @ AGO invited gallery visitors to create 'inner-selfies' – self-portraits without reference to external markers – using a bespoke web-based creation tool and online gallery. The project was augmented with a physical maker space and onsite gallery as the pandemic restrictions were lifted and the exhibition had an extended run of 14 months at the AGO.
Title
Lead Artist, project lead and concept.Media
Online maker tool and virtual gallery.Physical Maker Space and exhibit gallery.
Artist Statement
This project is an exploration of the sense of self. We all have one. We feel like we have some continuity in time and that we are distinct from someone else. We can point to ourselves in the past or the future. And yet when we look at who is doing the pointing, we can’t find any particular thing, just a field of sensations which is the thing that we were pointing at in the first place.What a strange folding-in-on-itself.
Inner Selfies is an open-community art project by Hanif Janmohamed and project partner, Maria Lantin. The public-engagement initiative includes a physical Maker Space in the Community Gallery at the AGO and an online digital creation tool and virtual gallery.
The artists invite us to reflect on self and no-self and ask us to consider questions about our runaway selfie culture. The visual metaphor of a Brain Scan provides the frame for a co-creation of thoughtful, human-made, poetic representations of identity and self, without the usual external markers of identity.
They could each be you.
For more, visit the Inner-Selfie Project Website
Exhibition History
July 2022 – November 2023. The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario. The project engaged gallery visitors online and onsite for 14 months during the pandemic and once public gathering restrictions were lifted.
Data-Selfies
Data-Driven Self-Portraits
These commission-based portraits are an iteration of the Inner Selfie exploration. These portraits are generated from personal data. Experientially they lie somewhere between a palm reading and an astrological forecast. Information for the portrait is gleaned from an online questionnaire and is processed to generate maps and visual artifacts which are then programmatically assembled to create unique self-portraits. The portraits are made available to participants as large-format prints to hang on the wall.
Title
Inner Selfie Data PortraitsMedia
Digital PrintsArtist Statement
Self-Representation as Digital Engagement & EmpowermentThese Data-derived Inner-Selfie portraits are framed within a composited scan of the generic human skull, rooting each in our common humanity.
The project invites users to explore their 'sense of self' and articulate their memories, evoking and expressing deeply liminal and subjective experiences and impressions.
Each of us experiences life as a journey. These portraits reflect those trajectories as the vital components that have truly shaped us. Our personal icons anchor our sense of self - places, songs, sayings, people or other manifestations of meaning, each are celebrated as the personal touchstones and essential aspects of selfhood that they are
By presenting a self-portrait in which external markers of identity – age, race, weight and gender, for example – are absent, these inner-selfies subvert traditional problematic notions of identity and force a deeper exploration of who we are under the skin.

INTER REGNUM
Installation
Inter-Regnum. A 2.5D wall-mounted piece that engages our relationship with maps and our mental models of the world. A remapped map of maps, Inter-Regnum proposes a borderless world where anywhere is everywhere, and everywhere is derived from somewhere else.
Title
Inter-Regnum, 2016Media
Shredded atlas, insect pins, beads, string, canvas, foam-core, plywood244 x 122 cms
Artist Statement
This map proposes a global ‘repatriation’ – the return of everyone to every place. The work reimagines boundaries, divisions and nations and presents a new model for understanding over here and over there. It questions what a sense of place can mean on a flattened ball in which any place is every place. The dimensionally restorative work also re-establishes a dimension lost to the abstracting practice of cartographic representation. This re-dimensioned and re-patriated map reflects a new world order – a re-configured and re-integrated two-and-a-half dimensioned world in which everywhere could literally be anywhere.
Exhibition History
GLOBE 2016 Conference and Innovation Expo, Vancouver. Coco et Olive, Main Street, Vancouver, BC
RELICS
ONE-OFF PRODUCT DESIGN
Relics is series of lighting objects derived from a research project. These prototypes were part of an exploration of an artisanal, semi-industrial production process for creating utilitarian poetic objects using discarded elements as the primary design material. An example of ‘Up-cycling’ before it had such a lovely name.
Title
Designer.Product Concept, Design, Fabrication.
Media
As designers, we work with our ideas from a blank slate as we conceive, invent and articulate the products that we live with. The life cycle of our design work is linear. It begins with raw materials that get fashioned and forged at our whim, and once consumed, it ends with the objects being discarded as they arrive at their ‘end of life’. However, this is not truly a complete cycle, so for this project, I imagined closing the gap and creating a life cycle loop within the design process itself.Artist Statement
By replacing the initial raw material for the lamps with discarded parts and objects, I started at the end to begin the cycle anew. The intention of this exercise was not simply to craft new objects, but to demonstrate how end-of-life objects could be up-cycled through a mediated and semi-industrial process. With a conscious move away from the realm of handcraft, these one-off prototypes were designed and detailed with a serial production process in mind to create a class of semi industrial objects.Exhibition History
This series of objects was published in leading design periodicals and provoked engaging dialogue about the production cycle and the role of the designer. All the lamps were acquired into private collections.
CELLULAR LANDSCAPES
Visual Art
Cellular Landscapes. This series examines scenarios of subject and context. The works are maquettes of a scenographic opera, and they imagine an allegorical microscopic world of my own cellular existence. My relationship to my environment is boundaried – me and other. So, what is the nature of the relationship of my cells to their environment? If I am the environment of my own cells, then where is the boundary of me in that equation?
Title
Cellular Landscapes. 2012Media
Mixed media, found objects, glass, plexiglass, wood.Artist Statement
This series of works imagines the allegorical microscopic world of a cellular existence, through a series of vignettes and shadow boxes. What is the nature of the relationship of a cell to its environment? What is the nature of the relationship of my cells to me? If i am both subject and field, then where is the me in the reduced scale of that equation - is it the cell? or the environment - the relationship itself?
In as much as i inhabit my environment, i am also the environment recursively inhabited by my own microscopic existence. At this scale what are the boundaries of the notion of a self? Cellular Landscapes engages with the recursive, mirror-like nature of these realms, and how they might relate to our notions of self and other in the interior 'space' of an imagined cellular existence.
Exhibition History
Cellular Landscapes. Roberts Creek Arts Festival, BC. 2012 Early Late Work. Coco et Olive. Vancouver, BC. 2013




MARGINALIA
SET DESIGN AND MOTION GRAPHICS
Marginalia:Re-Visioning Roy Kiyooka. An ethereal set, motion graphics and video projection for a performance work, celebrating the internationally acclaimed Canadian artist, Roy Kiyooka. The set and video projection enveloped performers and integrated the audience into the new-music piece. Winner of the 2008 Rio Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award.
Title
Creative Director.Scenography, Videography.
Media
Roy Kiyooka was an inspirational figure in the Canadian art scene. Awarded the Order of Canada, he was a painter, poet, performance artist, filmmaker and musician. Marginalia was a way of re-engaging with his work and ideas.Artist Statement
I took inspiration from Kiyooka’s work StoneDGloves, as well as his collection of photographs and poetry. I created a setting for the performance work by surrounding the ensemble in a landscape of stones and hung gloves. The audience interacted directly with the set. I also animated Kiyooka’s paintings and expanded on the stone/glove/poetry theme to create a feature-length video projection sequence.Exhibition History
Winner of the 2008 Rio Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award.A short video compilation with a few excerpts from the motion graphics, and the 90+min performance piece, Marginalia: Re-Visioning Roy Kiyooka.
Marginalia was a way of re-engaging with Roy's work and ideas. An ethereal set for an interdisciplinary new music performance in which projected video enveloped performers and integrated the audience into the piece.

Ethos
Image Collection
'Ethos' was a visual narrative. A collection of images, quotations and paraphrased comments that served as a treatise of a personal creative process. The collection received the Graphex Award from The Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC).
Title
Ethos - A Visual Treatise.Media
Digital ImageryArtist Statement
'Ethos' was a collection of images, quotations and paraphrased comments. The collection was designed to offer a visual treatise of the creative process. The collection received the Graphex Award from the Society of Canadian Graphic Designers.A few samples are included here.
