February 21 – May 2, 2026
Opening Saturday, February 21, 5–8pm

everything was once something else considers Los Angeles-based artist Roksana Pirouzmand’s ongoing inquiry into transformation, interconnectedness, and impermanence. Working with clay and metal, materials born of the earth and shaped by fire, Pirouzmand explores their contrasting qualities: one absorbent and porous, the other resonant and reverberant. Across her practice, matter becomes a conduit for thinking about cause and effect, fragility and force, and the ways energy moves between bodies, materials, and environments.

Presented across two sites, JOAN and OXY ARTS, with staggered openings, the exhibition features a series of new sculptural works linked through vibration and sound. Subtle movements, often imperceptible at first, activate chains of resonance that travel from one object to another, animating the invisible kineticism of the space and extending across sites.

At OXY ARTS, visitors move across sculptural works embedded with a vibrational surface, setting subtle resonances in motion. These vibrations travel from floor to sculpture and onward as sound waves to JOAN, where they activate—and, in some cases, erode—the clay works on view. Like a pebble dropped into water, a single action generates expanding ripples that gradually disperse and merge into a larger field. Sound waves echo water waves, and movement in one space is felt in another, registering on the skin as much as in the ear. These transmissions are mechanical and embodied: energy moves from body to object, from object to sound, registering gesture and touch across distances and seemingly discrete entities.

Working site-specifically, Pirouzmand creates sculptural objects, installations, and actions that perform in tandem with both the artist’s and the audience’s bodies. At JOAN, the project is titled everything was once something else (the land was the sea, the sea was the land), and at OXY ARTS, everything was once something else—a shift that reflects the exhibition’s movement across contexts. This project is invested in the transmission of sound and information through the movement of bodies across interconnected spaces. Relying on metaphor and poetics to complicate representations of loss, Pirouzmand’s installations often incorporate mechanisms that animate ceramic sculptures, hair, or pieces of furniture, activating the work through subtle movement and sound.

Moving between presence and imprint, Pirouzmand’s works take shape through her own body or through cast figures derived from her body and those of her mother and grandmother, honoring the lives of the women who have preceded her. In this way, her practice engages diasporic memory and forms of care and violence as lived, embodied conditions, unfolding through shifting, interwoven narratives. Water once again functions as a central material in the project: its interplay with clay informs sound and motion while tracing processes of erosion and fluidity that shape familial ties across diasporas. Here, reverberation becomes both material and metaphor, positioning the body as a site of ongoing negotiation between what is given and what is remade.

Upcoming Programming
As part of this project, JOAN will present a series of public programs. On March 20, JOAN will host a field trip to the Santa Fe Dam to mark the Persian New Year and the arrival of spring, featuring poetry readings and a guided site tour led by L.A. Infrastructure Inspections.

Later in the exhibition, a program will invite participants to a deep listening sound meditation on the rooftop of the Bendix Building, offering a bodily experience that echoes the sculptural reverberations unfolding within the exhibition.

Dates and additional details for all programs will be announced soon.

This project is part of JOAN’s Chapter Three programming (February 2026–April 2027), which launches with Roksana Pirouzmand’s exhibition, and unfolds across exhibitions, public programs, and a publication. Drawing on the legacy of Sergei Parajanov and The Color of Pomegranates (1969), it considers how beauty, violence, and embodied experience intersect across time and political conditions.

Roksana Pirouzmand (b. 1990, Yazd, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. Performance is central to her practice, informing a broader body of work that includes sculpture, installation, and two-dimensional imagery. Drawing from personal experience, Pirouzmand creates installation systems that foreground the body and its relation to space, proposing conditions of transformation, deterioration, and movement through encounters between the artist, the work, and the audience.

Her work has been exhibited at François Ghebaly, New York; Spurs Gallery, Beijing; Vernacular Institute, Mexico City; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Murmurs, Los Angeles; Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles; Guest House, Inglewood; Make Room, Los Angeles; Simon Lee Gallery, London; Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and The Box, Los Angeles. Pirouzmand received a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.