2026
What remains
Roksana Pirouzmand
Roksana Pirouzmand’s work begins by establishing conditions.
A body’s action results in a reaction. A material is acted upon. One force encounters another. Pirouzmand determines the circumstances through which these exchanges take place, but their consequences can often only be controlled to a certain extent. What happens next—a material’s reaction, the movement of water, or what a viewer finds within an image—remains unstable.
For hallowed like a shell in water, Pirouzmand created two monumental oxidation paintings using fourteen sheets of cold-rolled steel, seven 4 × 10-foot panels for each work. She first rendered the images on large sheets of paper before transferring them onto the steel, then painstakingly painted areas of the surface with a protective sealant. Each work took about two weeks to complete before the panels were carried outside, where acid, and water washes accelerated the oxidation process. Water pooled and dried. Acid reacted with the exposed metal. Rust spread across unprotected areas while the sealed portions resisted it.
Pirouzmand exercises enormous control over this process, but not over everything that follows. She determines what remains protected and what is exposed, introduces substances to the surface, accelerates or interrupts a reaction, and changes her approach. Eventually, however, the material responds to the conditions she has imposed upon it.
Concave and Convex are the largest oxidation paintings she has ever attempted. At the smaller scale she had previously worked, Pirouzmand could manipulate sheets of steel herself. Here, individual panels required three people to lift, turn, and reposition them. Increasing the scale changed more than the work’s dimensions. Weight, gravity, additional bodies, and the sidewalk outside the studio became part of its making. So did conditions no one could control. Texas heat and humidity affected the oxidation; wind blew unpredictably and shaped how the acid and water moved across the surface; and water evaporated differently from one day to the next. A process she understood had been displaced into unfamiliar circumstances, where the environment itself became another actor.
I watched this unfold over several weeks. There were moments of disappointment when the material did not behave as anticipated and others when an experiment produced something unexpected that felt immediately resolved. Some of the most dramatic passages across the steel resulted simply from water sitting on its surface. They were not images Pirouzmand set out to make, but evidence of the material reacting to what had been done to it.
It is tempting to understand this metaphorically. What happens when something is subjected to conditions beyond its control? How does it respond? What changes, what disappears, and what remains? Working alongside Pirouzmand, however, has made me increasingly cautious about answering those questions for her.
Before meeting Pirouzmand, I read interpretations of her work that located meaning through biography, identity, and cultural histories viewers believed rendered the imagery legible. Pirouzmand was born in Iran, and when I encountered an image whose meaning remained unresolved, I found myself reaching for what little I knew of her cultural background to explain it. That impulse revealed my own projections and desire to resolve the image rather than anything Pirouzmand had asked me to see within it.
Pirouzmand rarely provides that resolution. She speaks more readily about how something was made than what an image represents. Meaning does not necessarily precede making. Something may appear recognizable without settling comfortably into a single interpretation. She allows that instability to remain.
The same uncertainty extends into the large water basin occupying the center of the gallery. Two rocking chairs are mechanically connected to hinged steel sheets submerged beneath the water. When someone rocks, the corresponding sheet moves, displacing water and sending waves across the basin. With two participants, one movement encounters another. Waves meet, interrupt, or cancel one another before dissipating. Each performer controls their own movement, but neither controls everything that follows.
Displacement becomes both a physical fact and a possibility within these works. Steel displaces water. A familiar process shifts to an unfamiliar scale. An action travels beyond the body that initiated it. Displacement can carry other meanings as well, particularly in relation to a life lived across different languages, cultures, and geographies, but Pirouzmand does not require those meanings to explain what we are seeing.
She would often prefer that someone encounter the work before encountering an explanation. The desire to be told what we are looking at is itself a desire for certainty, and these works resist it. Ambiguity does not mean an absence of meaning. It allows meaning to remain unfixed.
Pirouzmand determines an image but cannot entirely determine what oxidation will do to it. She constructs a mechanism but cannot determine how water will respond to every movement. She makes a work but does not determine what every viewer will find within it.
Again and again, Pirouzmand establishes the conditions and allows something beyond her control to enter. Acid meets steel. Water meets movement. An image meets a viewer.
What remains is evidence that something happened.