Opening Reception: Friday, October 23, 5-9pm
Exhibition Dates: October 24 – November 21, 2015
Stephen Bulger Gallery is pleased to announce Imminent Infinite, our second solo exhibition by Sanaz Mazinani. The show debuts photographs made by methodically reconfiguring photographs from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Imminent Infinite uses scientific imagery of star clusters and supernovas that are imbued with the awe-inspiring power of the unknown.
This project is the latest in a series of works that draws from Mazinani’s now decade long cataloguing of imagery sourced from the World Wide Web. For Imminent Infinite, she has culled photographs, shapes, and colour sets endeavouring to assemble ideal compositions that act as portals to metaphysical exploration. Central to Mazinani’s practice is the study of digital photographic propagation and its impact on representation and perception. For the artist, visualizations of deep space infer the latent beauty in the unknown. The imagery of the cosmos becomes a metaphorical contrast to the limitations implicit in networks and systems of the post internet age.
In one work, Eclipsing Binaries, a dark quadrilateral rectangle hovers an inch away from the wall. The panel is divided into two parts: on the left is a dark segment of the night sky with hundreds of pinprick stars. The right shows dust clouds and a sparkling cluster of nearly three thousand stars in the Milky Way. The two parts come together much like the eclipsing binaries of hot O-Stars which are perpetually bound to one another by their gravitational forces. The motivation behind this work is the observation of the unknown and its potential for achieving insight — reached through the appreciation of the vastness of the invisible and the intangible. Together, the two discrete portions of the known universe presented in Eclipsing Binaries reference the observable realm as a poetic symbol that creates a palpable feeling of expansion and shifting.
Mazinani is interested in the delicate visual aesthetic of these highly imagined representations of outer space, and their infinite potential synthesized by a powerful resonance in the psyche. Dynamic geometric forms and vivid colours in the series unveil musings on space, perception, and connection. They aim to emphasize the relationship between simplicity and clarity, while simultaneously building a sense of movement that contrasts and resonates in a manner similar to hard-edge painting. By further manipulating these highly processed images, Mazinani raises questions about the existential, or “the imminent infinite” as she defines it.
Sanaz Mazinani was born in Tehran, Iran and now lives and works in San Francisco and Toronto. She obtained her MFA from Stanford University after completing her undergraduate degree in photography from the Ontario College of Art & Design University. Mazinani has participated in worldwide exhibitions including Screen and Décor, Southern Alberta Art Gallery; Threshold, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Ones and Zeroes, di Rosa Museum, Napa; Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize, Dubai; Image Reality, Fotografie Forum Frankfurt; and Twisted Sisters: Reimaging Urban Portraiture, Museum Bärengasse, Zürich. Her work is in private and public collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank; Connor, Clark &Lunn Financial Group; Facebook Inc; Kala Art Institute; San Francisco International Airport; and Tabrizi Law Office PC. Mazinani’s artwork has been written about in Artforum, Flash Art, artnet News, Border Crossings, NOW Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and Vice’s Creators Project. She has recently received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission, and completed a major public piece titled, U.S.A.I.R.A.N. commissioned by Out of the Box Projects in affiliation with the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities.
