Born-Porcelain

During a studio visit in preparation for this show, Yassi Mazandi told us a story about how she first arrived at her unique technique of “pulling” ceramic flowers during a pottery class. When the teacher told her that this was incorrect form, a classmate encouraged Mazandi by explaining that what she was doing was not wrong but different. And not only different but new—a real exploration of what the medium can do. “Doing different” hence became a kind of mantra for her practice, which flows from a deep curiosity about the world that is also sensitive to its fragility. The flower sculptures—which also serve as the starting point for Mazandi’s video and painting works—began from the thought that flowers, these reproductive organs so associated with beauty and love, lack a skeletal structure with which to weather the world. 

Born-Porcelain, Mazandi’s first solo exhibition with Make Room, follows a generative process that begins with ceramics but multiplies and transfigures through a series of experimental tests that push the limits of certain formal structures across different materials and media. The paintings on view in Born- Porcelain are generated from the structure of Mazandi’s flower sculptures, which are scanned using a CT machine and then manipulated to produce digital videos from which a single, symmetrical frame is taken as the basis for painting. The selection of works on paper offers another view into Mazandi’s practice, featuring examples of her imaginary Germs on Sheets series, as well as experiments with technique and materials. 

Taking an artistic approach to the methods of scientific inquiry, Mazandi’s work reveals a world where everything is connected through an underlying system of forms whose existence we can only assume based on the undeniable correspondence between the appearance of objects. 

Yassi Mazandi was born in Tehran, Iran, raised in Great Britain and lives and works in Los Angeles. She  describes nature and her reaction to it, both conscious and subconscious, as the driving forces behind her art. She sculpts in porcelain, clay and bronze, and also creates works on paper and canvas. She enjoys  expanding her creative frontiers with constant experimentation, including the combination of  traditional hand-intensive skills with the most relevant technological innovations. In 2019, she completed her first video artwork and, in 2021, her first NFT as well as her first AR artwork. Her work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, numerous group exhibitions,as well as a video interview with the BBC in 2013. In 2012, she was in the first group selected by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation for its Artist in Residence program on Captiva Island in Florida. Her work is in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, University of California and in other public and major private  collections both in the United States and internationally. 

This spring has been quite a whirlwind, and it’s hard to remember everything I saw. I typically use photographs to jog my memory, but it...