Selected Works 2018-2023

Camran Monsef

See it On Campus: Level 1

Bio

I was born in Montreal, raised in Vancouver. My parents immigrated to Canada from Iran five years before I was born. I have bachelors and masters degrees in political science and am currently a practicing real estate lawyer at the firm I founded with my brother, Lions Gate Law. I have a second degree black belt in sport kickboxing. Most importantly, I am happily married and the father of two (soon to be three) wonderful daughters.

Artist Statement

Most of my pieces center on my family, the first two are photos taken by my mom of me and my dad when I was a kid, the third one is of my dad when he was a young man in Iran. The fourth and fifth pieces are drawings made by my mom on a plane on a trip we took together in 2016, reproduced and placed into my paintings. She suffered a severe stroke in 2022 so I wanted to incorporate her work into mine as heirlooms to pass along to my kids one day.

Backgammon is a game I played with my dad and grandfather a lot when I was a kid. The board that I built was an answer to the question of what would happen if we extended the board into three panels instead of two.

The seventh piece is a print out on a single sheet of my entire 33,000 word masters thesis on political secularization in Iran, written in 2004 reproduced at size 1.5 font. At normal size font, it’s about 100 pages long. I wanted to see what it would look like if you could see the entire thesis all at once. The main argument of my thesis has proven to be correct, that there is a strong underlying demand for political secularization in Iran. It wasn’t evident on the surface when I wrote it in 2004, but has certainly boiled over since the death of Mahsa Amini in 2023.

The final two pieces are a drawing and a painting called Busy Bee that I made, depicting the feeling of being overwhelmed I get sometimes in my role as a lawyer.