Moving forward into the gallery, the first thing you approach on the left wall is the didactic curatorial text.
In dark red text against a light brown wall, the title reads:
ROKSANA PIROUZMAND
everything was once something else
February 12 - April 11
Then in smaller text, the description reads:
everything was once something else (lowercase) considers Los Angeles-based artist Roksana Pirouzmand’s ongoing inquiry into transformation, interconnectedness, and impermanence. Working with clay and metal, materials born of the earth and shaped by fire, Pirouzmand explores their contrasting qualities: one absorbent and porous, the other resonant and reverberant. Across her practice, matter becomes a conduit for thinking about cause and effect, fragility and force, and the ways energy moves between bodies, materials, and environments.
Presented across two sites, JOAN and OXY ARTS, the exhibition features a series of new sculptural works linked through vibration and sound. Subtle movements—often imperceptible at first—activate chains of resonance that travel from one object to another, animating the invisible kineticism of the space and extending across sites, as sounds originating at OXY ARTS are registered at JOAN. Like a pebble dropped into water, a single action generates expanding ripples that gradually disperse and merge into a larger field. Sound waves echo water waves; motion in one room is felt in another, registering on the skin as much as in the ear.
Additional works explore Pirouzmand’s interest in the embodied form, where gestures—hands tapping, surfaces touching—become sites of transmission. Here, energy moves from audience to sculpture, from sculpture to sound, and onward to other forms of matter, bringing into relief a shared condition of entanglement in which even the smallest action carries the potential to reverberate across time and space.
Roksana Pirouzmand is Occidental College’s Wanlass Artist in Residence. The Wanlass Residency is generously funded by the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation.
This is the end of the curatorial text. This is the last of the text on this wall.
Moving counter-clockwise in the gallery, two pieces hang on either side of a door.
These pieces are titled (in lowercase) “from one room to the other.”
The artwork on the left is a vertically oriented rectangular slab of dark wood, with a slightly rounded top. Faint white pigment forms a soft drawing of two human figures. The figures are shown from the side, crouching and facing away from each other, so that only their backs are visible. Their bodies are arranged symmetrically along the vertical center of the panel. Carved into the wood are narrow slits running down the middle of each figure’s back. A very small human figure (childlike in proportion, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand) is positioned between them. This figure appears to be crawling out of the slit in the left figure's back and into the slit in the right figure's back. At the top center of the panel, a tiny chandelier hangs down, aligned with the middle of the composition.
The artwork on the right consists of four horizontal wooden panels arranged side by side, with small gaps between them. Across all four panels are two large human figures, each spanning two panels. The figures are outlined in a dark pigment that blends into the natural tones of the wood. Both figures lie face down with their arms intertwined, their bodies oriented horizontally. Like the first artwork, slits are carved into the backs of the figures. Small human figures appear across the panels, emerging from or entering the openings in the larger bodies. White pigment highlights the feet of the large figures, as well as each of the smaller figures, making them stand out against the dark wood.
On the next clockwise wall is a sculptural piece mounted on the wall.
It is titled “Mountain.” This sculpture consists of a vertical stack of life-size, orange-brown ceramic cast hands. Each hand is cut off at the wrist and highly detailed, with visible fingernails and skin creases. The hands are arranged in pairs and rest palms down on a flat platform that extends outward from the wall. The hands are stacked directly on top on top of eachother, forming a column of fifteen pairs in total. As the stack rises, the angle of the hands gradually shifts. The lower hands lie more flat, while the upper hands tilt downward.
Beneath the platform, a painted shadow extends down the wall. The shadow mirrors the stacked form of the hands, stretching vertically. Near the bottom, it becomes uneven and rounded due to the shapes of the fingers.
On the next wall to the right is the final piece in this room, a sculptural piece mounted on the wall that spans it horizontally.
Pirouzmand titles this (in lowercase) “the land was the sea, the sea was the land.” On both the far left and far right sides of the composition are sets of ceramic cast human hands (two hands on each side, for a total of four). Each set appears positioned with the fingers pointing inward, toward the center of the piece. Extending from the fingertips of these hands are dark, metallic, branching forms. These shapes resemble organic growths such as roots or branches. The hands appear to be dragging these metallic formations across the wall, as if stretching the material between them. There is a dark residue visible on the hands, and traces of the metallic substance seem to seep from the fingers.
Moving through the open door that the first piece framed is the next, larger room of the gallery.
The walls are painted white. To the left is a niche with chairs and reading materials including a gallery map and artwork list, instead of individual labels. To the right are the artworks mounted on a stage of steel panels raised a couple inches above the ground spanning the room.
On the wall straight ahead, a poem is printed on the wall in black handwritten font. It reads:
Please step on the platform, walk among them. It might feel like you are walking on a fluid surface. The bodies may lean towards you. Or away. They may clink. Crack. Or fall. They sand down with each step you take. They will stroke one another time and time again. Someone somewhere else may feel your footsteps.
This is the end of the wall text.
On a placard stand nearby, it reads:
Please note that the floor surface is intentionally uneven. Utilize caution as you move through the space. Maximum floor capacity: 8.
This is the end of the placard.
Stepping onto the stage, the front-center piece is titled “Wave.”
Two clumps of thick steel wires bolted to the ground sprout upwards and meet each other, with dozens of life-size ceramic casted hands at their ends, palms down. The clay is reddish and unglazed. The artist’s hands that made the casts have visible details of wrinkles, palms lines, and knuckles. Their weight brings the wires down in the center between the clumps in an M-shape, their weight in tension with the strength of the wire. Some hands reach and touch each other towards the floor. When you walk on the steel floor around the pieces, it flexes beneath you and moves the foundation of the wires, sending the groups of hands in a waving, clamoring, and crashing motion. Some fingers broken by the motion lay on the floor, unmoved.
Behind “Wave” to the left is the piece “Horizon.”
Three full-length ceramic body casts laying facedown lay in a line, levitating at an average person’s waist-height. Laying in the order from ankle to overlapping heads to touching feet to head. They levitate mounted on the same steel wires. The clay is also reddish-brown, but slightly lighter than “Wave.” A dark polished wooden crib also levitates to encase the rightmost body from knee to head.
The bodies are that of the artist and her mother, both with similar short cropped haircuts captured in the cast as if submerged in invisible water, the hollow body casts are only the top halves: the back of the body in addition to the toes, omitting the subjects’ chest, front thighs, and face. The curves of the backs of the bodies form a silhouette of a horizon, easing in and out of concavity and convexity. The fluid wires mounting the ceramic in different places and a history of viewer interaction have meant the parts of the bodies have been pulled in different directions, cracking at certain joints and crashing together again at other times. Sediment from the breaking is gathered on the floor below.
Finally, to the right is the piece “Land.”
Five cast clay busts of the same woman levitate at eye level, mounted on the same steel rods. They are in a row in profile, two on left facing three on the right. The second bust is a lighter clay like “Horizon,” and the rest are the reddish color of “Wave.” The eyes and mouths of the faces are tightly clenched shut, holding their breath with rounded lips. There are some indented holes with small feathers poking through. The short cropped hair wetly lays closely flat to the shape of the head. From moving back and forth and knocking each other, some busts have become interlinked. The second bust leans temple to temple on the center bust, and the dust from the different clays rubbing against each other has left marks on each. The two on the right are fully interlocked, the right bust’s chin having caught the other’s front shoulder, ears locked together and clinging there, leaning down in the crook of the other’s neck. As you move the fluid floor, they may lean closer, kiss shoulders, or bang skulls together. At the time of your visit or as a result, they may have changed position, relationship or become more interlocked.
This concludes the screen reader guide.