“ Between physically shaping light and shining a light on an idea I get lost myself.“

Nooshin Rostami.

Nooshin Rostami is an artist, designer, and educator. They landed in New York from Tehran, Iran in 2009 and never made it back. This “flip of a coin” experience of displacement became the essence of Rostami’s exploration of identity, home, and place. They work with a glossary of materials and terms: light, shadows, reflections, structures, landscape, space, and place. They refer to these vocabularies within many different contexts both physical and metaphorical, to point to ways of seeing and connecting outside of textual or verbal language.

Rostami uses geometries and metaphors that dismantle and reconfigure the conditions of confinement: the vision of a fragmented box shattered into an expanding architectural landscape emerged after seven years of being away from their land. The deconstruction process of a rigid cubic form into fragments was Rostami’s means of spatial investigation and allegorical storytelling.

In 2017, Rostami built a light laboratory in their studio where they collect and gather mirrors, glass prisms, and objects with reflective or see-through surfaces to study the way they cast shadows or refract light. In this process, Rostami created a space of cultivating curiosity, close observation, and multitudes of perspectives. The light laboratory became their place to reflect, refract and illuminate while performing processes of emotional reflection and contemplation.

Drawing in the light laboratory means arranging an amalgam of tangible objects and intangible materials to construct new spatial awareness. In their work, drawing functions as a place of thinking, as a technique to catch the fleeting moment of light moving on a surface, a means of mapping a journey, and an archive for transitory moments of the performance. They call these compositions of light and shadows “light drawings” referring to their two-dimensional and often monochromatic nature. Drawing is another tool to capture the energy and the process of a moving body or object in space.

Through installation and performance-based work, Rostami activates indoor or outdoor spaces in which the audience is encouraged to experience the impact of displacement and losing one’s place physically, emotionally, and psychologically. For some of these experiences, the participant is invited inside the work to explore the interrelationship between shadows and physical objects, encouraging them to examine the fluidity and rigidity of their own beliefs. Through a playful process of physical participation, the viewer is coaxed to loosen their rigid ways of seeing. The new way of seeing unsettles the structures and systems of power which construct our visions, realities, and beliefs.

Rostami received an MFA from Brooklyn College CUNY in NY (2011) and has exhibited, and performed their work in solo and group settings internationally including California Museum of Photography - UCR ARTS (2019), Jardines de Mexico (2019), BRIC art Media(2019), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions - LACE (2018), Queens Museum(2018), and Flux Factory (2015). Since 2014 they have participated in residencies both locally and internationally such as Tifa working studios, NARS Foundation, and Art Omi.