During a studio visit in preparation for this show, Yassi Mazandi told us a story about how she first arrived at her unique technique of “pulling” ceramic fowers during a pottery class.

When the teacher told her that this was incorrect form, a classmate encouraged Mazandi by explaining that what she was doing was not wrong but different. And not only different but new—a real exploration of what the medium can do. “Doing different” hence became a kind of mantra for her practice, which fows from a deep curiosity about the world that is also sensitive to its fragility.

The fower sculptures—which also serve as the starting point for Mazandi’s video and painting works—began from the thought that fowers, these reproductive organs so associated with beauty and love, lack a skeletal structure with which to weather the world.

Born-Porcelain, Mazandi’s frst solo exhibition with Make Room, follows a generative process that begins with ceramics but multiplies and transfgures through a series of experimental tests that push the limits of certain formal structures across different materials and media. The paintings on view in Born-Porcelain are generated from the structure of Mazandi’s fower sculptures, which are scanned using a CT machine and then manipulated to produce digital videos from which a single, symmetrical frame is taken as the basis for painting. The selection of works on paper offers another view into Mazandi’s practice, featuring examples of her imaginary Germs on Sheets series, as well as experiments with technique and materials.

Taking an artistic approach to the methods of scientifc inquiry, Mazandi’s work reveals a world where everything is connected through an underlying system of forms whose existence we can only assume based on the undeniable correspondence between the appearance of objects.

Yassi Mazandi, born in Tehran, Iran, raised in Great Britain, lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She describes nature and her reaction to it, both conscious and subconscious, as the driving forces behind her art. Mazandi is a sculptor, painter and social activist.