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With artists: Farnaz Khosh-Sirat, and Hope Wang

​pressed like a breath collapsing into a sigh​ presents a collection of work by Chicago-based artists Farnaz Khosh-Sirat and Hope Wang, who look to their built environments as spatial productions of memory, power, and desire. Drawing on constructed nostalgia to navigate the dissonance between loss and belonging, both artists employ architectural patterns to evoke intimate realities of place.

By referencing hyper-specific architectural imagery and reconfiguring fragments of it, Khosh-Sirat and Wang produce “false” copies and traces of everyday life. These palimpsests take postures of longing that ​are not just decorative, but also serve primary functions as coded languages of their own. Khosh-Sirat utilises ​girih​, geometric patterns in Persian textiles and architecture, in her atmospheric sculptural installations. In an act devoted to mimicry that also reflects a desire for material to appear as something other…