Rising up within the ’90s in Yazd, Iran, Roksana Pirouzmand was surrounded by familial creativity. Her mom sewed all of the household’s garments, and her grandmother, remembering songs from her youth, performed them on the daf, a Persian drum usually utilized in weddings. Pirouzmand adopted an analogous proclivity for making issues along with her palms, although she entered highschool intending to check science, earlier than cajoling her dad and mom into letting her attend artwork faculty as a substitute.
After highschool, Pirouzmand and several other former classmates began an artwork collective; round 2008, they staged a collection of public interventions scattered across the campus of the Yazd Artwork and Structure College. For her piece, Pirouzmand stood in a pond, goggles masking her face, and tried to color a portrait underwater. It ended with the artist asking one in every of her lecturers, who was within the viewers, what he considered this subaquatic artwork. He didn’t reply.
“After the primary night time, [the university] was like, ‘sorry, you possibly can’t come again right here,’” Pirouzmand remembers, sitting in her ethereal storage studio in Sherman Oaks, California, the place she relocated in 2012 by way of a refugee program for spiritual minorities. She’s by no means had one other expertise fairly as dangerous and thrilling as that subaquatic public intervention. “These performances, despite the fact that I used to be undecided what I used to be doing … that was so thrilling,” she says. This pleasure has been a continuing by way of line animating Pirouzmand’s apply. Starting from painted ceramics to sculpture in varied metals, her works unfurl tales directly private and intergenerational, by turns playful and sobering.
Roksana Pirouzmand: Till All Is Dissolved, 2023.
Picture Josh White. Courtesy the artist.
Pirouzmand, who’s Zoroastrian, initially lived along with her aunt in Valencia, California, after emigrating from Iran. There, she discovered herself drawn to the interdisciplinary ethos of close by CalArts, and wound up pursuing her BFA there, honing her curiosity in efficiency but in addition exploring textiles and sculpture. In Really feel the Velvet (2015), a piece Pirouzmand made whereas nonetheless a scholar, she had members enter a gallery house one after the other, then placed on an unwieldy robe encrusted with velvet stones. Each time somebody wore the 50-pound costume, Pirouzmand sewed yet another stone on it. “I used to be occupied with the labor of being an artist,” she says. “By placing the burden on the viewers … I used to be distributing this labor, in a approach.”
Round 2020, Pirouzmand started portray on clay slabs, as a result of the Covid pandemic precluded having an viewers. The work initially mapped out future performances, in bodily and psychological realms. Quickly, a collection emerged entitled “I used to be praying at house when you had been dying on the streets” (2022), which envisions figures mendacity on the bottom as if meditating, their lengthy hair being drawn towards a void. These works additionally nod towards civil unrest in Iran, as does her 2022 efficiency, Tapping, Rocking, Remembering, whereby Pirouzmand tugged on strands of hair that had been hooked up—by way of a wall—to terra-cotta casts of her grandmother’s fingers: the tugs precipitated the fingers to faucet cacophonously.
Round that point, sculpture began to search out its approach into Pirouzmand’s work, however the physique stays decidedly current. One in every of her items within the newest version of Made in L.A., Till All Is Dissolved (2023), is a ceramic forged of 5 headless figures stacked over each other in an perspective of submission. Water flowing down the piece drenched and deteriorated the figures all through the present’s run, their our bodies cracking as their prayers appeared to offer option to begging.