Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present The Courtyard, an exhibition of new sculptural works by Los Angeles based artist, Rosha Yaghmai. This will be the artist's second solo show with the gallery.
Yaghmai creates objects that locate an uncanny familiar relationship to the subject and the viewer. Her practice is rooted in psychedelic concepts, exploring themes of reality and transformation. Often her exhibitions can be better understood as large-scale installations with many parts, suggesting scenes or a series of events. Her work stems from an ongoing experimentation with materials, most recently incorporating electric pipes, rust, produce bags, zinc oxide, corrective lenses, silicone, quilting cotton, brick, cement, asphalt and so on.
For her exhibition, Yaghmai takes the site of a courtyard and explores the public-private binary through a psychedelic lens. The Courtyard is a site for internal contemplation at the same time an environment exposed to the public eye. It is a performative space in which there is a back and forth relationship between the artist and the audience intended to cultivate a psychological narrative. The scene consists of an open area - or a courtyard - that is enclosed by walls on all four sides. Yaghmai’s sculptures placed throughout the yard waffle between the familiar and the unfamiliar; rusted pipes and melted lenses imbued with iridescent garbage reference street signs and lamp posts, UV lit, fiberglass casted arches are fabricated in the likeness of a late 80s California park bench. Along the perimeter of the set hang skin-like silicone windows and doors suggesting the existing private space beyond the courtyard.
The artist created a copy of a conventional scene and staged it in the gallery setting, thereby reframing it, in order to expose and manipulate existing narratives. Here affect remains estranging and de-familarizing. The otherness of the courtyard manifests a strangeness of the space that was once familiar.
Rosha Yaghmai lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2007. Solo and 2 person exhibitions include: Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, LA, CA; Weiss Berlin; Commonwealth & Council, LA, CA; Tif’s Desk, LA/Miami; Thomas Solomon Gallery, LA. Selected group shows include: KNOWLEDGES, Mount Wilson Observatory, Alta Dena, CA, Curated by Christina Ondrus; Present Future, Artissima Turin, Italy, Curated by Sohrab Mohebbi; 9/11 15 Years Later, Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA, Curated by Closing; Caviar, Central Park Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Ground Truths, Luckman Gallery, LA, CA; ET IN ARCADIA EGO, Estacion Tijuana, Tijuana, Mexico- Curated by Kris Kuramitsu; Seeing is Believing, Cal State Long Beach. Long Beach, Curated by Carol Cheh; THE STAND IN (OR A GLASS OF MILK) Phase 1: An Unbiased Teal, Phase 2: An Unabated Isle, Phase 3: An Unstable Idea, Public Fiction LA, CA, Curated by Lauren Mackler and Alex Gaty; HOT ROCK, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland.
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