Yassi Mazandi
Multi-media artist Yassi Mazandi explores the connections between organic forms and geometric patterns through sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Mazandi sculpts in porcelain and clay, throwing vessels on a potter’s wheel and then hand cutting and carving the pulled flanges, creating her unique “flower” forms. She enjoys expanding her creative frontiers with constant experimentation, including the combination of traditional hand-intensive skills with the most relevant technological innovations. She describes nature and her reaction to it, both conscious and subconscious, as the driving forces behind her art.
Yassi Mazandi was born in Tehran, Iran, raised in Great Britain and lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, including her recent sculptural installation, Language of Birds, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 2022 to 2024. 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 and has completed residencies at Gazell.io Digit Art House, London England (2021); Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, Ojai, California (2018-2019); ProjectArt, Los Angeles, California (2018-2019); and BoxoPROJECTS, Joshua Tree, California (2016). Her work is in the collections of the Artistic Museum of Contemporary Art, Cardiff, Wales; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleaveland, Ohio; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, among others.
“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
Food Chakras Series, 2013, mixed media on paper
Roanoke College Permanent Collection, Purchased with funds provided by Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo and the the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation, Inc.
In 2012 during her residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Mazandi experimented with combining sculpture and 2D imagery and created works she called “sculptographs.” Mazandi’s “sculptographs” were created by CT-scanning her wheel-thrown sculptures and layering the images on top of one another. The Food Chakra works are a series of drawings and paintings over original sculptograph scans of thrown flowers printed on handmade Japanese paper. Mazandi’s inspiration for this series came from when her blood chemistry was found to be out of balance. As a result, she was told to only eat certain foods and avoid others. Each Food Chakra is a visualization of the energy chakra of a particular dish.
Yassi Mazandi, Pizza Margherita, 2013, mixed media on paper, 10" x 8"
Yassi Mazandi, Mulled Wine, 2013, mixed media on paper, 10" x 8"
Yassi Mazandi, Marmalade , 2013, mixed media on paper, 10" x 8"
Yassi Mazandi, Blue Plate Special , 2013, mixed media on paper, 10" x 8"
Yassi Mazandi, Fried Chicken, 2013, mixed media on paper, 10" x 8"