Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to present The eyes, a solo exhibition project by Rosha Yaghmai for the Ojai Institute. The exhibition will be on view March 12 – May 7, 2022.
There will be a public reception to celebrate the opening on Saturday, March 12, 2022, from 5-7 pm.
The eyes is a site-responsive installation that draws attention to the architecture, geology, and history of place. This intervention by Yaghmai seeks to shift and blend vision, unearth and expose knowledge, while creating a multidimensional psychedelic space. The Ojai Institute and Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation gallery space becomes a platform for accessing the esoteric history of Ojai, while being transformed into an imagined portal through which one might transcend time and space. Additional sculptural works in the show explore material and meaning, offering many interpretations and avoiding specific revelation. Or perhaps the works reveal more to the individual upon closer examination.
Through a sculptural practice that melds industrial and craft processes, Rosha 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 the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) (2021), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco (2019). She was also included in the 2018 iteration of Made in LA at the Hammer Museum curated by Erin Christovale and Anne Ellegood.
Rosha Yaghmai lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2007. Solo and 2 person exhibitions include: Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, CA; Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles, CA; The Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA; Marlborough Contemporary, New York, NY; Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles, CA; Weiss Berlin, Germany; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, CA; Tif’s Desk, Los Angeles/Miami; and Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles, CA amongst others. Selected group shows include: Made in LA curated by Erin Christovale and Anne Ellegood, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Domestic Plane curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, and David Adamo, Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Mad World curated by Ali Subotnick, Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Virginia Woolf: An exhibition inspired by her Writings curated by Laura Smith, Tate ST. Ives, Cornwall, UK; The Annex, M+B, Los Angeles, CA; Hanging With Friends curated by Diana Molzan, The Finley, Los Angeles, CA; California Curse curated by Pejman Shojaei, Mothers Beach, CA; KNOWLEDGES curated by Christina Ondrus, Mount Wilson Observatory, Alta Dena, CA; Present Future curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, Artissima Turin, Italy; THE STAND IN (OR A GLASS OF MILK) curated by Lauren Mackler and Alex Gaty, Public Fiction, Los Angeles, CA; 9/11 15 Years Later, Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA; ET IN ARCADIA EGO, Estacion Tijuana, Tijuana, Mexico; Seeing is Believing curated by Carol Cheh, Cal State Long Beach, CA; and HOT ROCK, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland amongst others. Yaghmai is a Terra Foundation Fellow, Giverny, France (2009), a Villa Aurora Fellow, Berlin, Germany (2016), a recipient of the California Community Foundation grant (2019), The Chara Schreyer Arts Initiative (2020), and the Bullseye Glass Residency (2021).