Yassi Mazandi
“Geometry in nature I have always found fascinating. As a child I loved snowflakes. I still love snowflakes. I love the geometry of flowers. I ended up creating things that there is a geometry to them. There is a sense of mother nature in them and it makes sense.”
Yassi Mazandi is a multimedia artist who is based in Los Angeles, California. During the Rauschenberg Residency in 2012, Mazandi experimented with combining sculpture and 2D imagery creating works called “sculptographs” which are 3D scans of hand thrown flowers. Her series Food Chakras are drawings and paintings over the original sculptograph image printed on handmade Japanese paper. The inspiration for Food Chakras came about when the artist’s blood chemistry was found to be out of balance. As a result, Mazandi was told to only eat certain food and to avoid others. Each Food Chakra is a visualization of the energy chakra of a particular dish.
Yassi Mazandi, Spinach Omlette, 2013, mixed media
“I feel as though I am a three year old because I am always learning and I think the world is an extraordinary place. If you have the capacity to be a child and to recognize you are a child it means you can make mistakes and because you are a child you are more likely to forgive yourself for mistakes. Grownups don’t forgive themselves.
I think art has to be a movement forward. It can’t be stagnant, it can’t stay in the past, it can’t stay in the present. It has to have something that pushes it forward. I think human beings will always end up trying to make something new trying to make something different. Or trying to create something that makes something better.”
-Yassi Mazandi
Yassi Mazandi, Pomegranite Jam, 2013, mixed media
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. 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 of artists selected by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation for its Artist in Residence program on Captiva Island in Florida. Her work is in the collection 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.