Parker Gallery is proud to present Wet, its first solo exhibition with Sahar

Khoury.

Sculptor Sahar Khoury explores the interdependence of materials and

their social and cultural environments. Frequently bringing together

unlikely objects, she utilizes strategies of assemblage and an ethos of mul-

tiplicity. This new body of work, presented here for the first time, is the

result of two three-month-long residencies in 2024 and 2025 at the John

Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin where Khoury

had access to an industrial-scale metal Foundry and ceramics Pottery.

While making molds and casting have always been prominent features

of Khoury’s practice, they are the central processes evident in these

ceramic, steel, iron, brass, and aluminum sculptures, made with the aid of

technical factory technologies.

Finding that she needed an immense amount of force to execute the sand

molds used in metal casting, Khoury joined a gym for the first time in her

life where she began swimming and taking strength training classes. The

YMCA as a site for collectivity, equity, and literal body sculpting inspired

most of the forms in Wet. Khoury found that, in the space of the gym and

its pool, resistance, tension, propulsion, balance, density, and buoyancy

are achieved with the aid of objects such as swim weights, pull buoys, and

barbells. These items became the models for Khoury’s casts. Other nau-

tical accoutrement—including propellers, duck decoys, and rope—also

appear throughout the installation.

In the work Untitled (Body of Water), Khoury constructs a base of interlock-

ing blue ceramic tiles on top of which floats–among other things–a cast

duck decoy and porcelain pull buoy, glazed porcelain step up risers (some

of which absurdly function as candlestick holders), ceramic rolled mat, and

a replica of choereg, a traditional Armenian bread that happens to resem-

ble a flotation device. The sculptures Backstroke 1 and Backstroke 2 are con-

structed from molds of actual boat propellers cast in porcelain. The stacked

propellers of Backstroke 1 resemble vertebrae as they slowly spin at 1 RPM,

executing one full rotation per minute. Like a body treading water, they

expend energy while remaining stationary.

While researching gym equipment, Khoury learned that children’s play

structures are often built using the principles of the geodesic dome in

order to withstand large amounts of weight and tension. Seeking out

examples on Craigslist, she sourced two steel domes, constructed with

Buckminster Fuller’s principle of “tensegrity,” using latticed tetrahedrons

(a polyhedron with four triangular faces) to construct extremely light

but extremely strong structures—most famously in his geodesic domes.

Khoury turns the two nestled domes into a giant candelabra with cast

candlesticks that function as bolts. In invoking Fuller’s dome, Khoury

also considers Fuller’s late 1960s theory of the “Spaceship Earth,” a con-

cept of our planet as a shared home with finite resources in which sur-

vival depends on cooperation. Fuller wrote, "selfishness is unnecessary

and hence-forth unrationalizable.” The strongest structures—including

Khoury’s deadpan assortments of objects—involve the collaboration of

interlocking parts.

Sahar Khoury (b. 1973 in Chicago, IL, lives and works in Oakland, CA) received

her BA in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996 and her MFA From UC

Berkeley in 2013. Select solo exhibitions include Umm, Wexner Center for

the Arts, Columbus, OH (2023); You can't cut it up into pieces, CANADA,

New York, NY (2022); Orchard, Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco,

CA (2022); and 2019 SECA Art Award, The San Francisco Museum of Mod-

ern Art, San Francisco, CA (2019). Select group exhibitions include Rhyth-

mic Vibrations, American Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennial, curated by Abby

Chen and Naz Cuguolu, Gwangju, Korea (2024); Triennial Exhibition, Bay

Area Now 8, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2018); Art-

work for Bedrooms, CCA The Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA (2018); Her

work is included in the collections of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film

Archive, Berkeley, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; and San Fran-

cisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco, CA; Allen Memorial

Art Museum, Oberlin OH. Khoury's work is currently on view in the group exhi-

bition Rave Into the Future: Art in Motion at the Asian Art Museum, San Fran-

cisco, CA (2025-2026). Khoury's first West Coast solo museum exhibition and

largest exhibition to date, Sahar Khoury: Weights and Measures, will open at

the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, CA in January