Review: Spirit Gleaning

Review: Minoosh Zomorodinia’s Spirit Gleaning 

California, USA

by Sharon Siskin

 

Editor’s note: All photos were taken by Minoosh Zomorodinia at The David Ireland House. 

 

I. Introduction

WEAD artist Minoosh Zomorodinia is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice employs installation, performance, photography, video, animation, emerging technologies, and walking to interrogate issues related to the environment, displacement and migration, otherness, space, and time. Born in Iran and migrating to the United States in 2009, she often draws on embodied experiences within Muslim Iranian traditional ritual and culture. She has written:

My practice often explores the tensions between the physical and the emotional, the external environment and the internal self—how we relate to spaces, navigate environments and process the marks they leave on us. These ideas are central to my current interests in memory, displacement, and the interplay between nature and our human impact.

Last spring, Minoosh concluded a one-year artist residency at 500 Capp Street. Located in San Francisco’s Mission District, 500 Capp Street is a conceptual art space and formerly David Ireland’s home and art studio.¹ It is often referred to as the David Ireland House. Minoosh paid homage to the house as a living archive, drawing the connection between the spirit of the history of the house and the spirit of the local community. She paired deep respect for the house’s history and geography with her own futuristic imaginings and possibilities. Her residency culminated in a multidisciplinary experimental installation called Spirit Gleaning, which was on view from January through April 2025. Through augmented reality, altars and events, the project created lyrical connections between the history of The David Ireland House and the surrounding neighborhood.

 

II. Daily Gleaning

Minoosh’s work is rooted in the art of everyday life, much as David Ireland’s was. With that in mind, she began her residency by engaging in her longtime walking practice, documenting the spirit of the community. She walked the streets surrounding the house to gather ephemera from the lives lived there. This “spirit gleaning” involved taking photographs and making videos of wrought iron fences, gates, and railings, fruit stands, spice shops, garden plants, commercial signs, stained glass windows marking addresses above front doors, murals, street art, graffiti, trash, and even piles of cigarette butts.

 

Outside the house, Minoosh “gleaned” images of flowers from the community garden and placed them, as printed transparencies resembling stained glass, on the existing interior windows, connecting the architectural history and human-built environment to the more-than-human life of plants and trees outdoors.

 

III. Connections through Altars

In the spirit of Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and to honor that traditional practice in the Mission District, Minoosh created several altars inside and outside the house, inspired by the four natural elements of life—earth, water, fire, and air—each becoming a metaphor for memory and transformation. They combine David Ireland’s art objects, bringing them to life through video animation, often paired with discarded objects, reused bricks “gleaned” from Recology (the San Francisco dump), fruit, local plants, and candles. These altars documented the passage of time within the house and surrounding neighborhood, allowing her audiences to engage with a multiplicity of objects, spaces, and moments in time—all while standing still in one place.

The altars were site specific, thoughtfully connecting each element to a particular place in the house. The Water altar sat in a sink with a leaky faucet located in the bedroom, marking the fluidity of time. The history of San Francisco’s single room occupancy hotels was referenced through tiny images printed on old stickers affixed to the wall. These depicted a Mexican woman with a basket of fruit, honoring the memory of the house’s last resident.

 

 

The Fire altar was housed inside the fireplace. It included a projection of animated chopped alder firewood marked with David Ireland’s initials, along with augmented reality images inside the fireplace. Reflecting on more recent history and the fiery orange skies of the 2020 California wildfires, it invokes both the destructive and transformative power of fire. On the floor in front of the fireplace was a mosaic of spices carefully assembled to reference an architectural stained glass address marker. This mosaic also connected fire to cooking and the warm community created through shared meals.

The Air altar was located on the rooftop garden in the form of a dovecote—a birdhouse for doves and pigeons inspired by the Kabootar Khane of Yazd, Iran. In Iran, pigeons and doves are welcomed culturally, unlike in the U.S., where many people think about pigeons negatively, and spiky outdoor architectural elements are sometimes added to deter pigeons. Here, Minoosh’s tower-like architectural form, made from reused bricks collected at Recology, welcomed and provided shelter for birds. It was a metaphor for migration and freedom, honoring the presence of more-than-human life as part of the house’s history and emphasizing the ecological imperative for reciprocity with our more-than-human relatives today and into the future.

 

 

The Earth altar was a stop-motion animation projected on the staircase, referencing David Ireland’s broom artworks as they sweep dust and ghosts from the past. Minoosh’s intention for this altar is to symbolize the grounding element of earth and its connection to care and preservation of life on our planet.

 

IV. Communing

Another component of Spirit Gleaning was the dining room, which became a site for community engagement, inspired by the Iranian tradition of sharing food like Sholeh Zard (a Persian saffron rice pudding). Sholeh Zard holds cultural significance, as it is often made and distributed in substantial quantities for Nowruz (Persian New Year), Iftar (the meal eaten after sunset during Ramadan), and in religious ceremonies. Minoosh has used Sholeh Zard in previous artworks to engage audiences socially. Its yellow color is similar to the color of the walls of David Ireland’s house, creating more layers of connection and meaning. 

Also captured in Spirit Gleaning’s components was the passage of time, reflected in the aging of objects when viewed over multiple visits, and the changing light playing on them. This project was Minoosh’s dance with David and brought the gleaned living world outside into a dialog with the architectural, archeological, and psychophysical space inside the house—its walls, its residues from the passage of time, the lives lived there, and the objects within it that carry their own layered histories. 

Other community engagements connected to Spirit Gleaning included scheduled neighborhood walks, foraging, gleaning, and eating and drinking tea. The sharing of tea with honey referenced an encounter Minoosh had with a bee outside the house and David Ireland’s use of honey in his work. In the Community Building through Foraging, Walking, and Eating event, she invited participants to contribute their own spices or recipes to the Fire altar, followed by observations and dialog after an initial walk in the neighborhood. There was also a celebration of Bahar (spring), preparing food and staging the Iftar (the post-sunset meal after the daily fast of Ramadan). In each community-engaged public program, participants were invited to join Minoosh in curiosity, playfulness, foraging, and gleaning—to experience and celebrate the magic and awe of everything around us and life itself. Her residency concluded with a community-building event at the Makaan Residency at Minnesota Street Projects, and an event that involved street sweeping, tea, and story sharing in collaboration with WEAD (Women Eco Artists Dialog) at 500 Capp Street. The 500 Capp Street event honored David’s broom collection artwork and the durational ecofeminist art practice of Jo Hansen, the late co-founder of WEAD. 

Ireland has said, “I have this notion that art occurs in the process of life itself, and you don’t have to go outside of the context of your own life. It is all there, and you just tap into it. You open up to it. You have to make yourself available to the possibilities.” Like the German artist Joseph Beuys, who coined the term “social sculpture,” Ireland believed that art could be applied to the process of living and all human endeavors. Minoosh Zomorodinia’s practice is born from that same lineage, with 500 Capp Street providing a rich archaeological site from which she unearthed artifacts, metaphors, and meanings, creating the living archive that is Spirit Gleaning.

 

ENDNOTES

1. Karen Tsujimoto, The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are (Oakland Museum of California; University of California Press, 2003), 36.