Jackie Amézquita and Roksana Pirouzmand: "Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living"
Works In Progress is the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture podcast. It's available everywhere you listen to podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and Pandora.
For the first episode of the new season, artists and alumnae Jackie Amézquita M.F.A. ‘22 and Roksana Pirouzmand M.F.A. ‘22 join the podcast to discuss what originally drew them to art, their work in the Hammer Museum at UCLA’s Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, what they gained from their graduate studies at UCLA, and what it's like to be a working artist in Los Angeles.
Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living is the sixth iteration of the Hammer’s biennial exhibition highlighting the practices of artists working throughout the greater Los Angeles area. These practices embrace the value of craft, materiality, performance, and collectivity. The biennial situates art as an expanded field of culture that is entangled with everyday life; community networks; queer affect; and indigenous and diasporic histories.
As part of the show, the Hammer produced a series of short documentary videos profiling Made in L.A. 2023 artists — including Jackie and Roksana — on the Hammer Museum YouTube channel.
The history of Los Angeles is one of diasporic communities and migration. More than one-third of the city’s population is composed of Angelenos who have come here from all corners of the world, though especially from Mexico and Central America. Jackie Amézquita’s practice is a testimony to these histories in that she has herself lived through the impact of displacement and migration. Her primary materials are soil, corn masa (dough), limestone, salt, and copper, and she uses them to create sculptures that reflect on memory, collectivity, and transformation.
Roksana Pirouzmand creates sculptural objects and installations that perform in tandem with the artist’s body. Her recent works deal particularly with diasporic memory and forms of care and violence. In Roksana’s pieces, personal experiences are incorporated into installation systems, suggesting the possibility of transformation, deterioration, and movement through interactions between the artist and her work. Roksana is partly driven by a desire to reflect on the conditions of her life as an immigrant, depicting intimate narratives of her experience as an Iranian woman living in the United States. Her installations often involve mechanisms that animate objects through the pulsing presence of her body or sculptural works cast from either her body or those of her mother or grandmother, honoring the lives of the women who have preceded her.
Click here to listen to past episodes of Works In Progress.
Header image: Jackie Amézquita, left, and Roksana Pirouzmand, right, discuss their work with Sean Arenas/Works In Progress in Roksana's home studio. (Patrick Shao / UCLA Arts)
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