In a bright, paint-splattered studio at home in Montreal, the past is very much alive.

On the walls hang dreamlike canvases that shine between reality and illusion. The canvases, vibrant and trembling with grief, shimmer between history and hallucination. These are not merely paintings. They are conjuring. Testimonies. They are engaging in acts of defiance.

At their center is Marie Khediguian, an Armenian-Canadian artist whose work moves through time and memory with the creative power of poetry and the political force of a survivor’s witness.

“I don’t paint the past,”  she says,  “I paint its afterlife.”

Marie is the granddaughter of four survivors of the Armenian Genocide.  Her family’s story spans continents and calamities: from Merzovan, Sassoon, and Dikranagert, through orphanages in Syros, Greece, and exile in Alexandria, Egypt. Her grandparents lost everything and yet found one another. Her parents, born in Alexandria, fled again in the 1960s as the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood began to suffocate Egypt’s Christian communities. Eventually, they landed in Montreal — Tiohtià:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory — and rebuilt their lives one painting, one memory at a time.

Her father became a pediatrician for Montreal’s Armenian community. Her mother, his assistant, became the keeper of stories — and the quiet architect of Marie’s artistic inheritance.

“My mother’s dying wish,” Marie recalls, “was for me to never stop fighting for the people of Artsakh, and for the memories of our ancestors.”

She has kept that promise.
Not with protest signs, but with pigment and canvas.

Though trained as an architect, she is holding both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from McGill; Marie’s current work explores emotional, not structural, frameworks. Now pursuing a BFA in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University, she builds with memory instead of brick, using brushstrokes as blueprints for healing, rupture, and re-connection.

Her artistic practice is profoundly grounded in post-memory, a concept introduced by researcher Marianne Hirsch to articulate the emotional legacy of trauma endured by preceding generations. Post-memory becomes more than just an idea in Marie’s hands. It turns into an image: a blurry outline of a boy in a field that doesn’t exist anymore, a mother whose face is half-light and half-smoke, and a home that is filled with longing and stillness..

These scenes often begin with archival photographs and family snapshots worn by time and repetition, which she reinterprets through paint. But don’t expect tidy reconstructions. “They’re not recreations,” she explains. “They’re reimaginings.”

Colors are shifted. Figures may be missing. Shadows grow longer than they should. Everything is slightly off in that magical, unsettling way that memory often is.

“A single domestic scene can feel both familiar and estranged,” Khediguian says. “That’s where the emotional tension lives.”

Her style is painterly and layered, with nods to Arshile Gorky, another Armenian Genocide survivor whose abstractions mined the terrain of memory and loss, and Edward Hopper, whose lonely interiors resonate with a similar sense of quiet ache. She also cites David Hockney for his command of color and perspective and the mythical surrealism of Sergei Parajanov, the Armenian-Ukrainian filmmaker whose visual language defied logic in favor of sensation. But while Khediguian’s influences span cultures and genres, her foundation is always Armenian, rooted in a legacy of rupture, resilience, and reassembly. This deep connection to her heritage informs her artistic choices, allowing her to weave narratives that reflect both personal and collective experiences. Through her work, she preserves the stories of her ancestors and invites others to explore the complexities of identity in a modern world.

To enter one of Marie’s paintings is to enter a space where time collapses. A child’s dress may glow with the warmth of memory while her face disappears into the canvas. A living room may seem intact until you notice there are no doors. Each piece is a visual elegy, but also a challenge to see, to remember, and to care.

“Painting, for me, is a mourning ritual,” she says. “But it’s also resistance.”

In a world that is increasingly numbed to displacement, cultural erasure, and historical amnesia, her work insists on attention. It insists that memory, even secondhand memory, is political. That to remember is to refuse the finality of violence.

Her ongoing commitment to Artsakh, the Armenian land currently occupied and under constant threat, adds further weight to her practice. Her brush is not just artistic; it’s ancestral, activist, and alive.

As a mother of two, Marie often reflects on her legacy. She thinks about not only what she gets but also what she gives. Armenian folklore and oral tradition mix with crayons and lullabies in her home. Stories change. Paintings grow. Culture goes on, not untouched, but unbroken.

Marie is also a member of a local Armenian artist collective, where dialogue, mentorship, and cultural memory intersect. “We’re all trying to figure out how to carry this history,” she says. “And how to keep it from being buried.”

There’s a word in Armenian: karot. It means longing. Missing. It represents a profound yearning that remains unresolved. That’s what pulses through Khediguian’s work not sadness, exactly, but karot. A beautiful ache. It reaches across time, across silence, and across generations. Her paintings do not answer the unanswerable. They hold it. And in doing so, they give it shape, color, and voice.  

In a world that often asks the descendants of genocide to “move on,” Marie  chooses instead to move inward toward memory, toward mourning, toward the mythologies that make us whole. Her art does not offer closure. It offers communion.

In her hands, loss becomes language. And survival becomes sacred.

Marie Khediguian’s work has been featured in  exhibitions across Montreal and beyond. She continues to speak and write on themes of art, diaspora, and cultural memory. You can find Marie Khediguian on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/p/DK7yL2Wu_d9/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D for additional information and to see her most recent work.