Rosha Yaghmai '96

ARTIST STATEMENT

Rosha Yaghmai lives and works in Los Angeles. Through a sculptural practice that melds industrial and craft processes, Yaghmai’s work utilizes these provocations to alter the familiar. She uses materials such as silicon and resin for their skin-like translucency and bodily, fleshy quality. Yaghmai contrasts this softness with hard mediums like cast plaster or fiberglass to contradict the expected. Her work, in exhibition form, often takes shape as an assemblage of fragmented objects that evoke an environment of estrangement. Yaghmai is most interested in exploring themes of the psychedelic that includes feelings of transcendence and otherness. Using architectural structures like gates, doorways, courtyard walls, she hopes to push the feeling of passing through, telepathic transformation or metamorphosis. Yaghmai was the subject of a solo exhibition at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco in January 2019. She was also included in the 2018 iteration of Made in LA at the Hammer Museum.

She received her BFA in visual arts from School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2001, and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, in 2007. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. Forthcoming solo projects include LAX Art (LA), and Tyler Wood Gallery (SF).