Once at Present: Contemporary Art of the Bay Area Iranian Diaspora (2019)
Sanaz Mazinani and Mani Mazinani
Dark Sight (detail), 2017
Aluminum and acrylic
Dark Sight, a site-specific 9-foot-long sculpture created by siblings Sanaz Mazinani and Mani Mazinani, is comprised of a succession of two sets of six color filters on legs, each set successively larger than the last. The work functions as an invitation to think about how we look, and to consider the (real and metaphorical) lenses that might affect our view. “As viewers walk around the piece, it is possible for them to lean in between filters and get the effect of single hues inflecting a given line of vision. Yet, from the helm of the structure, with the filters lined up so that each new layer adds a further degree of obfuscation, the viewer’s visibility is lost. With no obvious position for the viewer to take, the work offers any number of possible perspectives, from beautiful and light filled to near total darkness. Where we stand matters, it suggests, and we would be wise to consider the sometimes invisible filters that may be mediating our view.” - Excerpt from Sara Knelman essay Seeing Through Noise (Sanaz Mazinani, Signal to Noise, 2019)
Once at Present: Contemporary Art of the Bay Area Iranian Diaspora
March 29 - April 20, 2019
Minnesota Street Project
San Francisco, CA
Photo credit: Scott Chernis