Ario Elami

A Hudson-based artist, graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts’ graduate program through Tufts University, and a composer and author as well. I claim dual citizenship as an Iranian and North American, and have spent my life among the east coast and Michigan.

Most of my latest work explores architecture as the tension between human design and nature as a home and a terror. Forms shift between structural designs and botanical and visceral analogies; coherence, or composition, struggles against incoherence/decomposition. This work has developed in tandem with a hypothetical understanding of the earliest architecture as numinous altars, upon which were laid sacrificial items such as teeth, eggs, skulls, and vertebrae; and a perception of nature as a roiling mass of aggressive life, perpetuating itself through overabundance. Architecture may have manifested out of something like a Dionysian desire to have sites be haunted by spirits and deities.

As a consequence, my work can be read meta-textually. It depicts sacrificial sites, and is itself an act of sacrifice, driven by mysterious aesthetic passions. Our modern materialist paradigm has deprived architecture of all its dimensions except the ecological and sociological. I see architecture, revitalized with its primeval, mythical, and poetic qualities, as a way back to aspects of the transcendent domain. I like to think of this art as paralleling the act of turning over a rotting log and finding beneath it an occulted, gnarled tangle of life — a place where life intermingles with the fecund properties of death, and one finds a simultaneity of the erotic, excretory, and orificial.

Architecture also offers abundant possibilities for compositional games and very particular visual obsessions. In some of my latest artwork, I've focused on structures of the exquisite corpse variety and notions of the grotesque. These pieces are rendered more playfully and graphically, emphasizing the sensual aspects: ribs, bulges, holes, hair. As these pieces have multiplied, they've started to form their own formally recursive, imaginary world, linking them to the capriccios of artists such as Piranesi, Gonzaga, and Boullée.

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My writing has been published on sites and in digital publications such as No Escape Magazine (1), DEEP HELL (1) Kotaku (1) Heterotopias (1), Kill Screen (1, 2), Unwinnable (1, 2), Game Music Online (1, 2, 3), and Boston Hassle (1, 2). My first album, Vurgon, was released on the Ubiktune label in 2013, and my second, MAGNO, was released in 2021. In recent years, I’ve done contractual work as a concept artist for several projects.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

  • Numinous Altars || Courthouse Gallery, Lake George NY; 2025

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

  • So It Goes || Wassaic Project, Wassaic NY; 2025

  • HOLIDAY || LABspace Gallery, Hillsdale NY; 2024

  • Ethica Naturalis || Goodluckhavefun Gallery, Austin TX; 2024

  • Drawn to Detail || Spencertown Academy, Spencertown NY; 2024

  • Other Places || Bill Arning Exhibitions, Kinderhook NY; 2024

  • Homes, Hamlets & Villages: Style and Lifestyle in Small Towns and Rural Communities || Spencertown Academy, Spencertown NY; 2023

  • Storylines || Gallery 263, Cambridge MA; 2021

  • Untitled exhibit || CultureHouse, Boston MA; 2020

  • SMFA & BPS 2016 Zine Exhibition || SMFA, Boston MA; 2016

  • Art of the Book || Dana Art Gallery, Wellesley, MA; 2014

  • Baker’s Dozen || Gallery Ehva, Provincetown MA; 2013

  • Thesis exhibition || Aidekman Arts Center, Medford, MA; 2013

  • WIT || Mission Hill Gallery, Boston MA; 2012

  • Proof of Purchase || Samsøn Projects, Boston MA; 2012

  • Print & Paper || SMFA, Boston MA; 2012

  • The Art of the Book || William Morris Hunt Memorial Library, Boston MA; 2012

  • Drawing Area Show || SMFA, Boston MA; 2012

  • Prints & Drawings || Works on Paper Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City IN; 2009

  • Grafted || DePree Art Center and Gallery, Holland MI; 2009

  • NYCAMS Student Show || Fall 2008 NYCAMS Gallery, NYC, NY; 2008

  • Annual Juried Student Show || DePree Art Center and Gallery, Holland MI; 2007

FAIRS

  • Outsider Art Fair || Metropolitan Pavilion, New York City NY; 2025

  • MICE 2022 || Fuller Building, Boston MA; 2022

  • MICE 2020 || Lesley University Hall, Cambridge MA; 2020


SELECT PUBLICATIONS

  • The Soul of Place: My Favorite Dark Souls Sites || No Escape (2022)

  • Ruins of Memory || Deep Hell (2020)

  • Souls Games are Great, Except for the Messages from Some Players || Kotaku (2018)

  • Secret Geometries || Heterotopias, Issue 2 (2017)

  • My Inner Scales || Unwinnable (2016)

  • Where Did the Fun Street Fighter Music Go? || Kill Screen (2016)

  • A Conversation on Boston's "Heroic" Architecture || Boston Hassle (2016)

  • How Dark Souls' Concept Art Might Have Deep Ties to Its Environmental Design || Gamasutra (2016)

  • Understanding the Sublime Architecture of Bloodborne || Kill Screen (2015)

  • Masashi Hamauzu Piano Works δ・ε・T_Comp 1 || Video Game Music Online (2014)