Persistent Memory: Nima Veiseh
Nima Veiseh utilizes his exceptional memory to produce thought-provoking art
Nima Veiseh isn’t gay, but he certainly understands what it’s like to come of age and feel different from the norm.
“It’s quite often that we struggle to understand a lot of ourselves,” Veiseh says. “We rely so much on the environment and the reference frames of others around us.”
In Veiseh’s case, his struggle was with hyperthymesia, an extremely rare, advanced autobiographical memory condition. It allows him to “remember every day of my life as if it were a film.” Now 31, Veiseh was 15 when he developed hyperthymesia, which affects about 50 people in the world. From the moment he fell in love for the first time, Veiseh remembers everything — although it took another few years before he fully realized that his memory was far from typical. While the average memory half-life is about four to seven days, Veiseh’s is several decades.
His exceptional memory fueled Veiseh’s interest in becoming an artist. “Imagine if you happen to remember every painting on every wall in every gallery you visited,” he says. “In a lot of ways that was an accidental graduate degree in art.” Veiseh has since formally studied art and technology at MIT, Georgetown and Columbia universities, developing his own body of work — including the pieces of a new show TimeFrames organized by local presenter ArtSee. Logan Circle’s Fathom Gallery will exhibit the show next Thursday, May 19.
Veiseh is touted as the only person in the world attempting to translate his perspective on life and memory into art — specifically, colorful, abstract mixed-media works created through an extensive layering process. It’s a core feature of his music-inspired series The Unresolved Chord. “Each one of these layers is actually 20 layers of paint,” Veiseh says. “But each layer — which is composed of either a texture or a color combination — only goes partially around the canvas, and then it stops. And then another layer starts, and your brain creates this continuity that evolves into this movement around the canvas.” Veiseh’s intentional asymmetry emulates an unresolved chord in music, something he hopes compels viewers to linger over the work, studying it in further detail to try and make sense of it.
Though engaged in the practice for years, Veiseh’s inspiration as an artist has only gotten stronger since coming out publicly as having hyperthymesia. “I’ve probably learned as much about myself and my own art in the last few months, because people are asking me questions that I would have never thought to ask myself,” he says. “And I’ve been channeling that introspection and evolution of understanding back into my art — creating pieces that are not only reflective of my evolving understanding of myself, but help people to think differently and more deeply about themselves and their relationship with their memories and the world around them.”
TimeFrames featuring Nima Veiseh on Thursday, May 19, from 6:30 p.m. to 10 p.m., at Fathom Gallery, 1333 14th St. NW. Call 202-588-8100 or visit fathomgallery.org.
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