Nooshin Rostami (b. 1986 ) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Morelos, Mexico. They earned a BA from the University of Art in Tehran, Iran, and an MFA in Studio Art from Brooklyn College, City University of NY. Rostami’s solo and two-person exhibitions include those at Transmitter Gallery and Tretle Gallery in NY and Jardines de Mexico in Morelos, Mexico. Their work has been included in group exhibitions at the Robert Lehman Gallery, the California Museum of Photography, BRIC Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, The Dineen and Hull Gallery, LACE Gallery, the Queens Museum, and Eyebeam. They were an invited resident at Art Omi, NARS Foundation, BRIC Media Arts, Urban Glass, and Tiffa India.
My world of art mirrors the inner terrains I navigate. Gazing into the far distance, I see hills traced in overlapping gray, like a sea held still in the sky. Clouds obscure the scenery in a haze, where a golden desert intertwines with ocean waves, and the wind folds two suns into the blue sky. My work is a place to return to this dream as a physical poem.
One can say I make things out of thin air: trapping air inside solid glass, redirecting air with fans to create drawings, or shining light through its ebb and flow to draw landscapes of water and sand. I create sculptures, drawings, videos, immersive installations, and performances that invite viewers to the doorstep between waking life and dream, unlocking new lenses for perceiving the material world.
My early work was anchored in my experience of exile. Through my practice, I alchemized my story of grief and longing for home into joy, liberation, and return. Turning inward loss into outward light. I became a follower of light and its mysterious nature, drawn increasingly to Sohrevardi's philosophy of illumination, a Persian philosopher who teaches that light itself is a means of acquiring knowledge and of existence. This belief shapes everything I make: light is not just what you see by, but what you come to know by.
My studio functions as a light laboratory, where I experiment with mirrors, prisms, and reflective surfaces to discover new ways of seeing objects through the interplay of light and shadow. In 2021, I began my journey into glassmaking by collaborating with glassblowers to create egg-shaped lenses that arrest air in molten glass. Once solidified, they reveal both micro and macro views simultaneously. I call these sculptures Dragon eggs! They are instruments that receive and send light, intermediary objects that manifest greater phenomena. Looking through one, a landscape can appear both near and far at once.
In all my pieces, I strive to capture that fleeting moment just before the horizon disappears into fog, the delicate balance between clarity and uncertainty. My work invites viewers to inhabit these thresholds, to stand, physically, in the space where presence becomes distance, where what is solid dissolves into mist, where light gives way to absence.
