Shaghayegh Cyrous, a visual artist from Tehran, Iran initiated the Lost Art Project upon moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2012. Feeling lost after moving halfway across the globe, she began the project as a way to build connections and allow others to reflect on their own identity by engaging with the persian rug, a symbol of her own identity. Cyrous grew up knowing the importance of the persian rug to her community- a symbol of beauty and art, a useful object in the home, and an heirloom passed down for generations, she felt her connection to the rug grow more important to her practice. After 3 years, the Lost Art Project has now generated over 5,000 images and travelled to over 20 countries and territories including Tunisia, Palestine, Norway, and Indonesia. For this exhibition Shaghayegh Cyrous painted a phone booth located just outside the California College of the Arts Meyer Library, encasing it in patterns and symbols she has often painted on her rugs. In the storefront display case, a rug frame…
Weatherlore is a process of divination and exchange between human culture and environment, through which we attempt to predict the weather, and to decipher meaning from it in turn. Abstraction is another means of reciprocal exchange through which signs, symbols and materials conjure meaning and metaphor. My work captures the sightlines, spatial relationships, and color conjunctions where the land meets the sea. Through paper, cotton, and paint, I translate experiences of atmosphere and seascape into their most essential, distilled expression, creating formal objects that are embedded with fragments and traces of memory, as if sunwashed by time.