File Not Found: Elizabeth Arzani + Quinha Faria
March 1-30, 2025
Opening Reception
Saturday, March 1, 5-8 pmOpen Hours
Sat-Sun 12-5 pmdrop in or by appointment
Email info@carnationcontemporary.com
to schedule a visit
Carnation Contemporary presents new paintings, print media, and sculptures by Quinha Faria and Elizabeth Arzani. Their collaborative exhibit, File Not Found, delves into themes of absence, missing links, deleted files, and off-line presence. Drawing inspiration from the language and infrastructure of technology, Faria and Arzani explore what happens when connections are interrupted or lost. Their work proposes a new lexicon for relationships, memory, and networks of care, where gaps of information hold space for transformation and new ways of relating.
Throughout the exhibition, lines loop and interlock, creating outlines, openings, and holes. Subtraction and addition at the same time. Imagine a hole as a place to care for a question; an entrance or exit to climb in and out of when looking for language. Is that the same as an extensive archive in a public library missing a folder on the subject of holes? How far is too deep before you get lost?
ARTISTS
Quinha Faria (b. 1988, Campinas, Brazil) is an artist whose practice examines systems of support and the perceptions of care work. Informed by over a decade of experience as a Registered Nurse, Faria works across painting, sculpture, and textile installation to explore the tension between repair and alteration. During her off hours as an ER nurse, she apprenticed with a master tailor to learn pattern-making at Baldwin’s, a beloved shop on Philadelphia's Fabric Row. Using materials such as lumber, twine, and wool, Faria examines how value is constructed and reassigned when the often-overlooked structures of support are revealed as integral to the image or object. Faria is in her last year at Bard MFA.Elizabeth Arzani (b. 1988, Charlotte, NC) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Portland, Oregon. As a collector of sorts, her work is rooted in storytelling, offering a form of communication that extends language. Using found fragments, collecting is simultaneously about what remains just as much as it is about what is lost. Fragments emphasize absence as presence, the we-know-not-whats, the silences—the holes. Arzani has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and has been granted residencies at Kulturschapp; Walferdange, Luxembourg and New Harmony Clay Project; New Harmony, IN. Arzani holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art and a BFA in Painting and Art Education from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.