Articles

The Civic Garden Center in midtown Edward Gardens is usually a place of prettiness, gentility and order.

Its reception desk provides the latest bumpf on azalea societies or delphinium clubs or begonia cultivation. (“Orchids are easier than you think!”)

Its Link Art gallery is inclined to host pleasant showings of nature photographs or watercolour flora.

It’s a setting that tends to make the exhibition that closes tomorrow all the more powerful. For the work of Toronto artist Afsaneh Shafai, on display these last two weeks, is as exotic as her Persian homeland, as Canadian in its themes as The Last Spike, as female as a labour pain, and as wrenchingly human as tears and sorrow and the question, “Who am I?”

Its eastern-ness is unmistakable (if possibly a little disconcerting, judging by some of the comments yesterday, to the matrons who staff the center).

Shafai was born in the small Iranian town of Maragheh. At 18, with the Khomeini revolution brewing, she was sent to Canada along with her younger brother to live with an uncle in Winnipeg. It was, to say the least, an abrupt and disorienting move.

“That age is a very tender time,” Shafai says. “And to arrive in a place where everything was so different was very difficult.”

At home in Iran, from the time she was a little girl, Shafai had been given lumps of dough by her grandmother to knead and shape as a way to calm herself when she was unhappy. It was, she thinks now, her initiation to art.

It was probably also the origins of her faith in art’s healing power. (The show is dedicated to her grandmother, and fabrics the older women had sewn and shawls she sent to Canada are incorporated into Shafai’s mixed medium work.)

In Winnipeg, Shafai took a bachelor of fine arts at the University of Manitoba. She moved to Toronto in 1982, married and had two children.

But as an immigrant to Canada still struggling for a sense of connection, as a mother and eventually a single parent, her crisis of self was profound. Not least of which was the coming to terms with herself as a woman who had grown up in a constraining culture.

“Basically, I’m trying in the work to acknowledge myself as a woman who is okay, who has some power.”

The exhibit, titled Reflections, is a brave chronicle of her emotional journey.

In early work, with its distinctly eastern motifs, Shafai was looking backwards, focused on her homeland, the exterior influences, the culture and history that had shaped her.

In more recent years, the work showed a turning inward, a tumultuous and palpably painful, if eventually liberating, journey of discovery.

As a theme, few things can be more Canadian, this being a nation of immigrants, than the reconciling of past and present, of old country and new home, of the search for identity and a sense of place.

If the comments in a guest book are any indication, it is a challenge understood and widely shared.

“Your work heals the soul of a lonely person,” someone has written. For Shafai, praise could hardly come much higher. She works now as an art therapist, primarily with immigrants, refugees and victims of torture.

“I identify with that group, from my own journey of trying to make Canada home, or of bringing home here if I have no choice of going back.”

“I understand the need for a feeling of belonging, of needing to ground myself,” she says.

“One of the ways I can is helping people who are in my shoes. My focus in art therapy is to help them grieve, to grieve the loss of their past, to help them connect with the beauty of the past and not just the ugliness they might have had to flee.”

It is 24 years ago this week that she arrived in Canada and still Shafai searches for a feeling of rootedness.

“I still don’t feel it. There’s still that longing to be home. I know I don’t belong there. I keep trying to belong here.”

Her most recent work in the show is titled Another Journey. Exuberant and unfettered by the borders and walls that characterized earlier work, it is the latest stage of an evolution that seems to speak increasingly of awareness, understanding and confidence.

Shafai laughs now as she recalls that it was not that many years ago she was found the wherewithal to say out loud what she was.

In a bank, someone handling an application had asked her occupation. After much hesitation, she finally said it. “I’m an artist.”

How long have you been one? The clerk asked.

Shafai thought of her grandmother and the dough she used to mold, thought of the way in which she had coped all her life with dislocation, loss and sense of exclusion. She thought of how she had sought for self. And the answer was obvious. Always.