Yassi Mandi: The Sacred Wheel
Maloney Fine Art
January 11th – February 22nd, 2014
2680 South La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles
Maloney Fine Arts will be presenting The Sacred Wheel, an exhibition of new ceramic sculpture and works on paper by Los Angeles artist Yassi Mazandi. Taking her cues from the symmetry and repetition of natural forms—petals, crystals, snowflakes, and skeletons—Yassi has created a personal structural vocabulary in clay with infinite compositional variations. These biologically inspired sculptures seem simultaneously ancient and futuristic, mechanical and natural, masculine and feminine—equally referencing sacred geometry, the art of Sri Yantras, crystal formation, bridges and fractal geometry.
Labyrinthine and seemingly engineered, these one-of-a-kind works were initially divined from thrown ceramic vessels, with manual cuts and bends in the pliable material resulting in rhythmic objects that have now evolved from recognizable vessels to monochromatic “foreign” objects displayed on vertical stands, cementing their status as sculpture in a wide variety of materials and scales. Titled Flowers, these elemental shapes and complex patterns are based on mathematical principles but they are not simply systematic as the hand of the artist always intervenes, pulling, carving, finishing and layering. One of the objects in this exhibition represents a new process and medium—a geopolymer based on stone from the Dolomites, finished by hand—created in collaboration with a fabricator in Italy.
During her art residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Yassi took advantage of the opportunity to explore other media – namely, painting, printmaking, and photography—translating three-dimensional scans of her sculptures into two dimensions, which she calls sculptographs. She digitally manipulates aurasmic colors, in hues ranging from electric bright pink to midnight blue, and ultimately prints some on canvas and paper, some of which she works by hand, sanding and painting the surfaces. These shapes take on astronomical dimension in this form, appearing like generative novas or other cosmic events.
For further information, please visit http://www.maloneyfineart.com.
