
My Sister (Markar elementary school, Yazd, Iran, 2005)
2022
A ceramic tile bearing a childhood photograph, "My Sister" fixes a moment from 2005 at Markar elementary school in Yazd, Iran, translating the intimacy of personal memory into fired clay, glaze, and slip. Roksana Pirouzmand works in a format that hovers between the domestic object and the art historical tradition of ceramic portraiture, but the effect here is quietly disarming rather than monumental. The image, transferred onto a modest rectangular ground barely larger than a paperback book, carries the soft tonal compression of an old school photograph, its colors absorbed into the material surface as though memory itself has seeped into the clay. The result is an object that reads simultaneously as keepsake and artifact, collapsing the distance between private archive and considered artwork. Pirouzmand, born in Yazd in 1990 and now based in Los Angeles, brings to this work a sensibility shaped by years of performance practice in Tehran and rigorous graduate study at UCLA. Her ceramic works engage the photograph not as a document to be reproduced but as raw material to be metabolized, the firing process introducing an irreducible contingency that no print or screen can replicate. The title's parenthetical annotation, naming the school and the year, anchors the image in a specific social and geographic reality without sentimentalizing it. That precision is characteristic of an artist attentive to how individual lives are inscribed within larger institutional and national histories. Measuring 18.4 by 25.4 centimeters and signed by the artist, this work is scaled for close, sustained looking rather than declarative display. It entered wider visibility through Pirouzmand's inclusion in "Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living" at the Hammer Museum, and her representation by Murmurs Gallery has positioned her as one of the more compelling voices in Los Angeles's current ceramic-adjacent conversation around diaspora, photography, and material memory. Presented through the Venice Art Walk Benefit Auction, this piece offers collectors early access to a body of work that is already earning serious institutional attention.
- Medium
- Ceramic (clay, glaze, slip)
- Overall
- Signed
- Yes
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