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 - ongoing

Media

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.

Bering Bearing -1 (Diptych). Installation photo, THNK School of Creative Leadership, Vancouver. CT-SCAN + NASA-EO images
Shanghai at Night-2, CT-SCAN + NASA-EO image (Shanghai, Eastern China)
Vancouver Tete-a-Tete, CT-SCAN + NASA-EO image + Historical map of Vancouver
BT_Paris at Night
BT-Mississippi-2
BT-Mississippi-5
BT-Mississippi-3
Columbia Glacier, CT-SCAN + NASA-EO image (The Columbia Glacier, Prince William Sound, Alaska)
Iturralde, CT-SCAN + NASA-EO image (The Iturralde Structure, Bolivian Amazon)
Cyberia, CT-SCAN + NASA-EO image (Fall Snow in Siberia, Russia)
Mixed Mindscape - 1, CT-SCAN + NASA-EO images. (digital collage).
Mixed Mindscape - 2, CT-SCAN + NASA-EO images. (digital collage).
Bering Bearing - 1 (Diptych) MRI + NASA-EO image. (Cloud Streets over Bering Sea)
Brain Terrains - composite, CT-SCAN + NASA-EO images.
Cortical Meander, X-RAY + NASA-EO images. (digital collage). Backlit Panel
Pink Iliac, X-RAY + NASA-EO images. (Yukon Delta, digital collage)
Thoracic Journey, X-RAY + NASA-EO images. (Rub’ al Khali, Saudi Arabia, digital collage)

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.
Installation view.
Installation View.
Installation View - panel detail
Panel detail
Panel detail
Panel 1: Fall Snow in Siberia
Panel 2: Shanghai At Night
Panel 3: Record Rainfall Floods Midwest
Panel 4: London at Night
Panel 6: Flooded Rice Fields in Louisiana
Panel 7: The Pearl – Qatar
Panel 8: Folded Rocks of Northwest Iran
Panel 9: Toronto at Night (Source: Roscosmos, Oleg Kononenko)
Panel 10: A Swirl of Clouds over the Pacific

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.
Examples of Inner-Selfies created by the public and posted to the online gallery.
Examples of Inner-Selfies created by the public and posted to the online gallery.
Examples of Inner-Selfies created by the public and posted to the online gallery.
A sample Inner-Selfie posted to the website
A sample Inner-Selfie posted to the website
A sample Inner-Selfie posted to the website
One of the authors selfies
One of the authors selfies
large 'selfie wall' mural
Entry to exhibition space with 'selfie-wall' mural.
Inner Selfie Maker-space
Inner Selfie Maker-space
Inner-Selfies created and exhibited in the Community Gallery Maker-space
Inner-Selfies created and exhibited in the Community Gallery Maker-space
An Inner-Selfie created and exhibited in the Community Gallery Maker-space
Inner-Selfies created and exhibited in the Community Gallery Maker-space
The AGO Community Gallery maker space
Selected Inner-Selfies were included in a card deck of 'polaroids'
Selected Inner-Selfies included in a card deck of 'polaroids'
Invitation to create selfie polaroids
Examples of Selfie polaroids
Inner-Selfie Poster
A poll of participants measured the optimism and sense of agency regarding the future.

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 Portraits

Media

Digital Prints

Artist Statement

Self-Representation as Digital Engagement & Empowerment

These 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.
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Data-generated Inner-Selfie
Sample Questionnaire.

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, 2016

Media

Shredded atlas, insect pins, beads, string, canvas, foam-core, plywood

244 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.
Pentapus.
L'occhio.
L'eremita.
Il Bivio.
La Medusa.
Il Vortice.
La Strega.
La Strega, detail.
La Strega, detail.
La Ballerina.

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. 2012

Media

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
Nervous Debut (maquettes for an opera in 3 acts) Triptych, mixed media. Late Early Work Exhibition at Coco et Olive.
Nervous Debut (maquettes for an opera in 3 acts) - Detail. Triptych, mixed media. Late Early Work Exhibition at Coco et Olive.
Nervous Debut (maquettes for an opera in 3 acts) - Detail. Triptych, mixed media. Late Early Work Exhibition at Coco et Olive.
Nervous Debut (maquettes for an opera in 3 acts) - Detail. Triptych, mixed media. Late Early Work Exhibition at Coco et Olive.
Cellular Narratives Exhibition. Roberts Creek Arts Festival.
Neuronal Specimens. Mixed Media. Cellular Narratives Exhibition. Roberts Creek Arts Festival.
Three Fates. Mixed Media. Cellular Narratives Exhibition. Roberts Creek Arts Festival.
Three Fates - Detail. Mixed Media. Cellular Narratives Exhibition. Roberts Creek Arts Festival.
Neural Congruence - Detail. Mixed Media. Cellular Narratives Exhibition. Roberts Creek Arts Festival.
Sanguine Branch - Detail. Mixed Media. Cellular Narratives Exhibition. Roberts Creek Arts Festival.
Sanguine Branch - Detail. Mixed Media. Cellular Narratives Exhibition. Roberts Creek Arts Festival.

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.

Still from the performance.
Still from the performance.
Kiyooka's poetry applied to elements of the scenography.
Low pressure sodium lighting transformed Kiyooka's poetry.

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 Imagery

Artist 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.
'Salt makes mi steaks taste great' - Barenaked Ladies.
'The eye is made of a different material than the rest of the body' – Alberto Giacometti.
'I prefer to plot my path from Point A to Point B, and launch myself with the hope of arriving at an as yet unknown Point C' – Italo Calvino.
'Turbulence is what creates the lift under an airplane wing. Broadway interrupts the grid and the turbulence around it brings a hub of creativity' – Isao Hosoe
'The fog horn need not lament the good opinion of the fog' – Graham Greene.
'By overdelivering, you can direct the client's attention to what you want them to drop' – Bruno Munari.