Rosha Yaghmai “Postcards & Pipes”

Marlborough Contemporary

[Image: Rosha Yaghmai "White Caps" (silver awning) (2017) fiberglass, resin, enamel, 81 3/4 x 58 x 9 in. (detail).]

This event has ended.

Marlborough Contemporary New York presents a solo exhibition of wall-mounted and floor sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Rosha Yaghmai.

Referred to as Awnings, the wall-hanging works, which veer into a territory of pure painting, are fittingly cast in fiberglass from draped canvas. This undulating shape becomes a uniform support upon which Yaghmai enacts a sequence of loose chromatic explorations and subtractive sanding and scraping. Each abstraction is derived from a postcard image (with a particular focus on the horizon) that has been obliterated and reduced to its essential components of color and mass. In effect, Yaghmai replaces geographic location with the emotional residue of place.

The freestanding sculptures more directly telegraph Yaghmai’s preoccupation with mechanisms of seeing and the eye itself. Fittingly titled Optometers, and constructed from found industrial conduit, these slim and serpentine works are, surprisingly, embellished with tinted eyeglass lenses and wisps of eyeshadow. Each of these organic, rugged forms is rooted in a clean, geometric cube of translucent cast rubber that serves both as stabilizing base and elegant refinement.

It is this resolution of the raw presence of the industrial, and the more allusive mysteries of the subconscious that is precisely Yaghmai’s territory. The familiar and the unexpected conspire, as in a dream, formulating a heightened but slippery reality.

Rosha Yaghmai was born in 1979 in Santa Monica, California, and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2007. She has mounted solo and group exhibitions at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Cleopatra’s, Weiss Berlin, Commonwealth & Council, Transmission Gallery, and Public Fiction, and will be featured in exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Tate St. Ives in 2018. She is the recipient of the Terra Foundation Fellowship. The artist currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.