Rex Delafkaran
Jump Rope (candle, both ends), 2025
Beeswax, wick
13 x 13 x 120 inches

This work is made from many waxed wicks, hand spun into rope. Attached at each end are beeswax casts. It has the properties of a functional candle, to burn at both ends, and as a jump rope. It can be installed in a variety of ways. It’s a kind of time keeper, play, endurance, exhaustion, and in the rope’s tension an anxiety of time running out.

Rex Delafkaran is an Iranian-American interdisciplinary artist and dancer from California, based in Chicago. Her artworks use bodies and objects to play with the failure, poetry and labor among readymade and handmade materials, while exploring the constructions of identity and language as we find ourselves squeezed through violence of late stage capitalism. Delafkaran has exhibited and performed at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, DC; Panoply Performance Lab, NY; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Platform Projects, Greece; Textile Museum, Washington, DC; Satellite Art Fair, FL; and EXPO Chicago, IL, among others. She is a recipient of a Warhol Foundation ‘Wherewithal Research Grant’ and recently awarded the Eldon Danhausen Sculpture Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Delafkaran holds a degree in Ceramics and Performance from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

https://rexdelafkaran.com/