Rosha Yaghmai. Postcards & Pipes

About

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.