August 16 – September 22, Massy Arts will host, Inter/me/diary, a new exhibition by visual artist and educator Yasaman Moussavi.

“Inter/me/diary” reflects Moussavi’s interest in investigating the sense of space, which is fleeting and veiled, through the exploration of architectonic and linguistic structures.

The two primary sources of inspiration in this series are the traditional central courtyard of Persian domestic architecture — as a site of spatial and social interactions — and family epistolary communications and diaries — as a means of emotional and social exchange between family members in and far away from home.

The Massy Arts Gallery is located at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday, 12pm to 5pm.
Entrance is free, and masks are mandatory.

To contact the gallery, send an email to: info@massyarts.com.

: :

The Show

In this series, central courtyards served as a threshold space in the heart of the private domestic spaces that facilitated public interactions. Epistolary communications, at the same time, were written procedures that transmitted the interiority of the self to the exterior world.

In Moussavi’s work, these sources of inspiration meet while she puts together fragments of family epistolary communications and shaped dyed pulp paper to create a sense of space.

Her artwork has evolved around paper, a material that hosts the inscribed words and allows for the expression of sentiments and memories. However, paper ceases to be a bare surface of inscription, and rather performs as a pre-textual structure (construct) that translates the written ephemeral senses into an impression of a physical space.

: :

The Artist

Yasaman Moussavi is a visual artist and educator. She is a Ph.D. student in Art Education at the University of British Columbia.

Yasaman holds an MFA with two emphases in Painting and Printmaking from Texas Tech University, where she explored and developed her skills in papermaking, printmaking, and installation art.

In her art-based research project, Yasaman explores the ways in which art-making intervenes the established social relations in order to recover the embodied act of mapping and place-making as a constituent to build social bonding.

Her works have been displayed and published in many national and international solo and group exhibitions such as Juried International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Irving Arts Center, TX and A.I.R Gallery Biennial, Brooklyn, NY, among others.

She is a co-founder of Didaar Art Collective, a Chicago -based Iranian art community.

: :