To create a being out of oneself is very serious. I am creating myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do. – Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. – Wallace Stevens, Parts of the world
The collection of works on view in Self Devourer at Make Room was conceived during various points of the past two years. A scattering of moments and thoughts as I, along with the world itself, entered an unfamiliar, everything-doing-just-fine mode of being and living. I sensed a hint of repression. Every moment, every tiniest decision, every bit, byte and atom, can cause the most dramatic change. Yet, we glide through life.
All humans share 99.9% of their genetic makeup and are within 50th cousins of each other.
“Am I Asian American to you?” I once asked a friend of mine, a second-generation Asian American himself. “No.” He explained that I was not because I did not share the same kind of upbringing which formed a crucial part of his identity. Then I asked “How about your mother?” He paused for a few seconds, then looked directly into my eyes and said, “No, I guess she is not.”
When I sequenced my genome in 2019, I was overwhelmed by the amount of data produced from a tiny droplet of saliva: 3,117,275,501 base pairs. How can one decipher something that large?
There comes a point in life where one confronts their own triviality. A common story shared here: students studying abroad till their immigration, marriage and, perhaps, parenthood. I desperately, secretly, hoping to find something special, in the most literal sense, from within myself. Having my DNA tested was thrilling—a revelation of the most forbidden of secrets. I was disappointed.
Sometimes I feel myself falling: a drop of water falls into the ocean. The sensation of disappearing gave me a peculiar sense of calmness. I was part of it.
To grasp this idea, I made an accordion book that could extend however long needed while allowing me to meditate in the process of printing, gluing, rubbing, and folding. It ended up being a book of about one thousand pages of the tiniest letters that I could read with bare eyes. The volume and weight of these papers were my access to the spells contained in every cell of mine.
Several years later, when I traveled back to the US after a long trip home, I felt this unshakable disconnect with myself. I struggled to recognize and locate myself among the various identities I am constantly obtaining and losing, and often wondered in my thoughts alone in the studio: an artist, a woman, an engineer, a Chinese immigrant, an Asian American, a daughter…
Being an artist is quite consuming. The artist has an insatiable appetite. I realized I had become this relentless creature consuming herself. I had to cut her open for examination, for reassembly, for display. She is my only material. The only thing that is mine.
That was when I dug out those papers I had made, the extra duplicates from the book of mine. Somehow, as I flipped through the pages, those unreadable bytes and bits were no longer confusing. These mysterious letters presented me with an opening: a slate of meaninglessness, of intuition, of plausible translation without understanding. And so I began to sew.
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Born-Porcelain, Yassi 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.
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.
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.
