Standing before Zarina Karapetyan's The Dakini Portal, time seems to fold in on itself. Volcanic smoke meets starlight, and memory becomes medium. Amid Dallas’s frenetic Art Week, where Instagram moments dominate, Karapetyan’s work does something quietly radical: it asks you to slow down, to notice. The Armenian-born, Dallas-based artist captures attention precisely through what she describes as ""a deep devotion to time, to moments that can’t be repeated."" Each work, she explains, is a timestamp, marking seasons of her life in ways that persist, quietly but vividly, long after viewing.

Karapetyan doesn’t speak of inspiration in abstract or clichéd terms. She speaks of it like someone keeping watch. For her, creativity is less about ideas arriving and more about noticing. Noticing how winter light refracts through a crystal and spills across the wall, how a memory resurfaces unexpectedly, how time leaves quietly without a trace. “Each piece is a timestamp,” she says, “a psychic imprint of that specific season of my life.” 

This April, Karapetyan participated in an offsite activation at The Joule Hotel, presented by BREDA during Dallas Art Week. While the fair itself occupied the expected terrain of white booths and collector buzz, BREDA’s pop-up, featuring Karapetyan and sculptor Ashley Stuart, offered something more subterranean: an ambient field of feeling, one that asked viewers to pause for the moment, rather than pose for it.

“The works I contributed carry a kind of internal gravity,” Karapetyan says. “And I felt that same grounded energy in the pop-up itself. Alongside Ashley’s work, it felt like we were forming a magnetic field, a steady hum.”

It’s not a metaphor she uses lightly. Her paintings The Dakini Portal and Vivarium Sun were born of intensely personal moments: standing atop a volcano in the middle of the night, spending a birthday alone in reflection. They engage not only with time but with memory as medium. “The Dakini Portal features a red background that’s actually a landscape painting I made based on a photo I took three years ago,” she explains. “The red wash is the meeting of volcanic smoke and stars, and layered on top is a mandala in the shape of an hourglass, marking a conscious shift in time.”

In these moments of personal significance, her work makes a compelling case for what might be called felt time: an internal clock kept by memory, longing, and attention. That makes her a natural fit for BREDA, whose timepieces operate in the space between function and emotional metaphor. “BREDA’s designs reflect refinement, intention, and a quiet spirit,” Karapetyan says. In her studio, she wears the Coda in Gold/Midnight, which is a timepiece that like her paintings, moves fluidly between moments. Designed where endings meet beginnings, Coda reflects the quiet transitions her work so often traces. “Much of my work explores those same themes, so it felt like an intuitive alignment.” That same commitment to beauty, shaped by time and care, extends beyond her studio and into the city she calls home.

Karapetyan’s perspective on Dallas is clear-eyed. She doesn’t romanticize the city, but she does believe in its pulse. “What often gets overlooked about the Dallas art scene is how deeply committed the community is to the arts,” she says. “It feels like a city of artists who take their work seriously and are focused on long-term careers.”

Beneath her words is a recognition that not all support is visible. When asked about her influences, she doesn’t list institutions or gatekeepers. She names people. Lesli Marshall. Sarah Reyes. Daniel Driensky. “I’ve been lucky to build a strong community of fellow artists, collaborators, and innovators who continue to shape my path.” At its heart, that is what gives a city its soul: people who keep other people going.

Just as her creative circle grounds her emotionally, the physical landscape of Dallas presents a different kind of challenge, one that has shaped her relationship to stillness, place, and presence. “My Armenian heritage shows up most deeply in my connection to land and nature,” she says. “Dallas offers incredible community and creative opportunity, but the land itself is different, there are no mountains, few rivers. So, I’ve had to search for peace in smaller, quieter pockets.”

That duality between the surface and the search isn’t something Karapetyan points to with frustration, it’s more like a quiet fact she’s learned to live with. “While [Dallas] celebrates surface and speed, I feel like many artists here have made a quiet pact to move differently: to observe, to reflect, to build with intention,” she says. “There’s a soft rebellion in that.”

And maybe that’s what her work is, too, not a statement, not even a resistance exactly, but a decision to stay with something longer than you're expected to. To make meaning slowly, through repetition and return. There’s nothing flashy about it. No performance. Just a kind of steadiness that becomes more visible the more you’re willing to look. In a city that so often celebrates what’s immediate or popular, her work asks for something else. Stillness. Trust. Time. Qualities she has cultivated slowly, both in herself and in her work.

Because the things that matter don’t tend to arrive with fanfare. Memory doesn’t. Neither does intimacy. Or understanding. Or presence. They accumulate. They settle in unnoticed, then suddenly feel like they’ve been there forever. And maybe that’s what lingers, long after the booths come down and the lobby empties out, not just the image of a red sun or the outline of an hourglass, but the feeling that something stayed with you. Quietly. Without needing to ask.

Images by Helen Jade.