GALLERY 2

Pooneh Maghazehe: Half-Life

6 May – 26 June 2022

Using unconventional materials, often for their symbolic qualities, Pooneh Maghazehe (b. 1979, Brooklyn, NY) investigates the degree to which objects and imagery retain their meanings and associations when reconfigured or abstracted from their original contexts. She seeks, in her own words, “recognizable imagery to create conceptually layered sculptures that cumulatively become self-referential and self-complicating.” Her most recent constructions map the memory of a momentary observation of identical twin girls on a beach sharing sips from a Diet Coke. Small clues or snippets from this memory — a plaster cast of a seagull head, a flash of the Diet Coke logo, bits that resemble crushed seashells or sand — permeate the work but never resolve into a complete narrative. 

Playing with concepts of duplication, division, and weights both literal and metaphoric, Maghazehe’s sculptures are as much about building as deconstructing and, to this end, often integrate the tools with which they’re made, e.g. cast replicas alongside the molds that produced them, in the presentation of “a doubled imaging of positive and negative that mines the conflicted nature of an ‘original’.” This counterpoise of originalities finds reflection in the sculptures’ physical balancing, with interdependent components held in place by the equal distribution of weight and the resistance of a ceiling jack to represent one thoroughgoing gesture. Rich in color, texture, and a keen attention to materiality, Maghazehe’s sculptures have a theatrical, almost fantastical presence, but are also imbued with imagery of splitting and decay, evocative of memory’s half-life. 

Curated by Beth Venn.