Chapter NY is thrilled to present Rosha Yaghmai’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

In Roving Wire, Los Angeles–based artist Rosha Yaghmai presents sand-cast sculptures and layered organza paintings amid a porous “forest” of frosted totems—a landscape both cosmic and internal, beyond any specific geography or narrative. Installed across the gallery’s floor and walls, her forms appear partly terrestrial, like petrified trunks and monumental bones rising from the ground, and partly ethereal, like currents of light and dust crystallized into long tubes, or energy rising through the spine, linking body, perception, and history in an almost-mythic register.

Landscape in Yaghmai’s work is a psychophysical condition: at once vastly external and intimate, remembered and invented, accruing in the body over time with primordial and ancestral imprints that cannot be consciously accessed but which our bodies somatically hold. The exhibition’s scale likewise oscillates between micro and macro, supposing a bird’s eye view of looking above terrain and simultaneously floating within a field of electrified forms and stimuli and frequencies. Her objects and images take the mutability of scale and site as a starting point, even as their frameworks for thought exist outside fixed geography or clock-time.

Yaghmai’s objects evoke what appears behind closed eyes and beyond archival record. Harnessing processes of abstraction that occur both within the earth (through heat, compression, and pressure) and the mind’s own tectonics (learning, assuming, remembering, forgetting), the resulting works glisten like flashes of miniature tide pools, or unsettled matter, forming and dissolving at the edge of recognition.

Sculptures such as Postcard and her paintings, titled Afterimages (2026) carry the aura of places known to her directly but also impossible for her to know. Cast in recycled aluminum, the sculptures are formed by pouring molten metal into molds from which wax, foam, and other transient materials have been burned out, leaving voids that render absence as durable, present form. Molten yet ethereal, untethered yet rooted, they resist the framing of diasporic movement as tragedy, nostalgia, or resilience. Absence becomes crusty mass and reconfigured surface, another life she might live in a parallel dimension.

Her paintings operate through a related logic of accumulation and removal. Yaghmai works in sheer textiles sprayed with color fields and atmospheric “plumes,” or with auras of absent information digitally extracted from images of symbolic Persian miniatures. By obscuring the narrative iconography of these tiny, ancient paintings —Yaghmai shifts the focus away from heritage toward the flickering presence of how ancestral thought-forms and earthly forces are perceived peripherally and passed down almost vibrationally: through molecules and frequencies illegible to the human eye and Enlightenment rationality.

If myth and metrics enter, they do so obliquely. In Zoroastrian cosmology, a river of molten silver once covered the earth, transforming it into a metallic shell; the liquid aluminum here echoes that cyclical transformation, remaking unstable matter into durable form. Yet the gesture is neither apocalyptic nor redemptive. It is part of an ongoing origin story, among many origin stories that are read and told, but not really felt. Yaghmai’s work is absorbed through the body, through intuition, through what cannot be fully accessed or explained. Each object becomes a momentary origin, caught between emergence and dissolution, between looking down at terrain to make sense of it by controlling it, and allowing ourselves to float and merge within it, existing as something murky and luminous, infinitesimal and miraculous.

Rosha Yaghmai (b. 1978 Santa Monica, CA, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from California institute of the Arts in 2007 and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2001. Solo and two person exhibitions include: The Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA; Marlborough Contemporary, New York, NY; Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles, CA; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, Selected group shows include: Long Story Short, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration, Jewish Museum, New York; Made in LA, Hammer Museum,Los Angeles, CA; The Domestic Plane, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; Mad World, Marciano Collection, Los Angeles, CA; Virginia Woolf: An exhibition inspired by her writings, Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK; THE STAND IN (OR A GLASS OF MILK), Public Fiction Los Angeles, CA;  HOT ROCK, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland.

Yaghmai’s work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA (MAC3); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.