Link to exhibit images and artists

Presented by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s contemporary art department (Abby Chen & Naz Cuguoglu), “Rhythmic Vibrations” inquires about what it means to present Asian art and to be the Asian Art Museum in the USA at this moment in history. This presentation marks several firsts: it is the first time in both the museum and American history that the Asian Art Museum has been invited to represent the USA on a globally significant platform, and it is also the inaugural American Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennial. Curated by two immigrant curators, this exhibition rehistoricizes the narrative of an American Pavilion, examining the potential implications of this milestone for the museum and the art community.

“Do we represent America and does America represent us?” This exhibition showcases the curatorial attempt to share their version of America. More interested in posing questions than providing answers, “Rhythmic Vibrations” features artists from the Asian Art Museum’s newly developed contemporary art collection, as well as artists active in the Bay Area (Sahar Khoury, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Younhee Chung Paik, Gazelle Samizay, and TT Takemoto), beyond the Bay Area (Labkhand Olfatmanesh and Hayal Pozanti) and beyond the USA (Chang Li-Ren, HORSE & Yujun Wang—suggested by Matsu Biennial—, Jane Jin Kaisen, and Lo Lai Lai Natalie). The exhibition highlights a sample of artists the museum engages with, whether as part of the collection, through alliance and allyship building, or through admiration. The collaborative approach focuses on working with artists who are more familiar to the audience at large and bringing attention to lesser-known artists.

Presented at the May 18 Memorial Culture Center, this exhibition holds particular significance as it coincides with the 30th anniversary of the May 18 Foundation’s establishment. In a tribute to the Gwangju uprising, the exhibition honors the resilience and sacrifices of those who fought for human dignity. By amplifying the voices of women and queer artists hailing from Hong Kong, Iran, Jordan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Taiwan, and Turkey, this exhibition highlights different kinds of uprisings, and exercises of noise making and generating rhythmic vibrations. 

This project marks a pivotal moment, rewriting the narrative to end marginalization. Following its presentation at Gwangju Biennale, the exhibition will return to the USA to be restaged at the Asian Art Museum and then to Matsu Biennial. As the work travels, the curators aim to move closer to answering the profound questions they pose. However, the Gwangju Biennale edition is particularly crucial, as it serves as a platform for experimenting with borderless ideas, irrespective of nationality. To facilitate a collective search for clues, gatherings will be organized during the opening week, inviting friends and allies to reflect on what it means for the Asian Art Museum to represent America in Asia. 

As part of the Arts Center’s celebration of the Arts/Industry residency program’s 50th anniversary, the twelve artists in residence at the Kohler Co. factory during 2024 will exhibit their work in a yearlong group exhibition, Clocking In: 2024 Arts/Industry Residents.

The exhibition will present four residents’ work at a time, in rotations of approximately four months each. The first rotation features artists Shae Bishop, Sahar Khoury, Martha Poggioli, and Edra Soto.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

Umm features an assemblage of sculptures that draws on familial and global histories, time keeping, and memory’s ever-evolving form in response to the present.

Reflective of her training as an anthropologist, Khoury’s works incorporate a range of techniques and media—ceramic, metal, glass, papier-mâché, textiles—as well as cast-off materials and objects. This exhibition features a Wexner Center–commissioned assemblage of off-kilter sculptures inspired by music and food, which Khoury uses as symbols of inclusion, exclusion, and transformation. You’ll encounter a kebab wind chime, a neon night-light holding Palestinian olive oil, and an 18 foot tall radio tower. The exhibition also features new tile plinths realized through a partnership with Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico.

The exhibition title translates to mother in Arabic, and it is also a reference to the iconic Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum (c. 1904–75)—world-renowned for her vocal range, impassioned performances, and improvisational prowess. Kulthum became a symbol of pan-Arab unity and was described as both Egypt’s fourth pyramid and the mother of Arabs. For over four decades, Kuthum’s live concerts were broadcast throughout the Arab world on the first Thursday of each month. In that spirit, the Wexner Center will present a special music program on the first Thursday of every month during the exhibition’s run.

We are thrilled to announce the opening of Group Shoe 3, a group exhibition curated by Mario Ayala featuring work by one-hundred and seventy-two artists from his community of friends and collaborators. 
Artist List:

Curated by Andrew Sungtaek

Participating Artists: Y. Malik Jalal, Gozié Ojini, Sahar Khoury , Umico Niwa, Michael Bala, Jeff Williams, Peter Simensky, Brandon Ndife

The sun exists within a funny contradiction of our perception. It takes around 8 minutes for the sun’s light to reach the earth. So what we experience is an embodiment of the past and what we understand, the sun as an object, exists somewhere in our future, yet to be perceived, guiding our path forward with its gravitational pull. Our future largely depends on our relationship to the past just as life depends on the sun. We use the sun as a measure of time, and time is a measure of change, and change is our only constant. So how might we shape change and what does tomorrow hold? Old Sun, New Sun brings forth a group of artists for their ability to see the physical world around us in new light. Each artists employs an Inventive approach to uncover the buried potential and embedded histories of our material reality. The exhibition title Old Sun, New Sun derives inspiration from an epigram in the drafts of Octavia Butler’s unfinished sequel Parable of the Trickster. A small ripple in the extant reverberations of the late artists’ work, distorting and disrupting a reflection of the reality we’ve come to know. There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns. - Octavia E. Butler 

Recology believes that art plays a unique role in educating and inspiring the public. By supporting artists who create work from materials that have been thrown away, the Recology Artist in Residence (AIR) Programs encourage us to see discarded materials in a new light and reflect on our own consumption practices.

Founded in San Francisco in 1990, Recology AIR Programs now operate in four cities: San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Astoria. GLEAN in Portland is a collaboration between Recology, crackedpots, an environmental arts organization, and Metro, the regional government that manages the Portland metropolitan area’s garbage and recycling system. In Astoria, the Coastal Oregon Artist Residency (COAR), is a collaboration between Recology and Astoria Visual Arts.

Over 170 professional and 30 student artists have participated in these programs.

Sahar Khoury: You can't cut it up into pieces
March 11 – April 9, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday, March 11, 6 – 8 PM

CHEW LOW
SWALLOW LA
WHOLE HOLE
FIELD GOAL

Sahar asked me and Colter Jacobsen, my partner, to write something about her show in part because her current work plays with the idea and energy of couples. 

BOLT ESTHER
PING PONG
PART PARTNER
PARMESAN LOAF

There isn’t much in Sahar’s recent work that reads overtly as pertaining to couples. Perhaps the closest she comes is a pair of cast bronze opium poppy stems--a sly nod to Jasper John’s famous pair of Ballantine Ale Cans--that poke out from the top of a precarious tower of filigreed ceramic. And the double-headed snake-like wooden spoons carved from an apple tree outside Sahar’s studio suggests how awkward togetherness can sometimes be.

There is another ceramic tower that she has adorned with two bronze falafel balls. These hint at coupledom, though they read equally as simple ornamental finials; that is, until you find two more half-eaten falafels (also in bronze) hiding elsewhere on the sculpture, at which point they are revealed as unquestionably gastronomic.

MOLDY ORANGE
PATINA PERSIAN
BLACK LIME
MOLDS HOLD

As Sahar’s title for the show (You Can’t Cut It Into Pieces) suggests, the kind of couple explored here is one that is indivisible. If you are in a relationship and you have a  regular day, the sort of things that might stand out are the blueberry in your breakfast cereal that was a little bit off, the funny way your cat held its paw over its eyes, the cover of a book your partner got in the mail, or a golden net you saw in a dream: none of it is that important but you can’t take any of it away.

FALAFEL TREE
SPRING MATTRESS  
SPIRAL BILABIAL
IDENTITY DIGESTED

All couples are precarious and incomprehensible. Somehow, they hold together. Through love, I guess, though other things come into it, like animals and sharing the passage of time. One sculpture features Sahar’s half-blind poodle, Esther, who appears in multiple, one poodle for each of the seven days of the week. In Untitled (Alicia, hello forever) the dates 2021-2022, 2023-2024 and so on become lacey bricks which, in turn, are stacked into transparent walls. The temporal architecture of love.

TREE BOLTED
IDENTITY WEDGED
IDENTITY CAST
AT BAY

In contrast to her abstract armatures, Sahar presents several pictorial works that sometimes verge on traditional landscape painting, with trees and clouds—even a horse and rider--and colors reminiscent of Hockney, Hodgkin, and Hartigan. They remind me of Duchamp’s encyclopedic Boite, souvenirs jam packed with sentiment and small enough to carry off in an emergency. And I love that they are made from Friskie’s boxes. 

BORDER DISORDER
BOUNDARY DISORIENTAL
BODY BARK
ARMOR AMOUR

Sahar is not about to sum it all up. She joins fragments into contingent associations that are less like a resolution than a pause in an animated conversation. An American-style football meets a black and white kaffieyeh in the company of a ring of metal fleurs de lis; a rickety TV tray floats above the word Orientalism; a collection of red belts loops in and out of a curvilinear ceramic maze.  Couples talk like this, in layers.  

PAWS 2 
SCRATCH THE
POPPY 2
EXTRACT THE SAP

MILK BLACK
BLOCK CAPITALS 
GIANT CLOCK
PING TOCK

-Written by Larry Rinder and Colter Jacobsen

Moving beyond conventional categories and genres, the 77th Scripps College Ceramic Annual ignites a new contemplation on the ceramics world. The longest ongoing exhibition of contemporary ceramics in the nation will open on January 29th and continue through April 10th. Participating artists include Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Sharbani Das Gupta, Nicki Green, Julia Haft-Candell, Kahlil Robert Irving, Anabel Juárez, David Katz, Sahar Khoury, Nathan Lynch, Annabeth Rosen, Nicole Seisler, Anna Sew Hoy, and Linda Sormin. This exhibition features an illustrated catalog with an essay by writer Leah Ollman. The opening reception, featuring live music and light refreshments, at the Williamson Gallery from 7 to 9 pm. These events are free and open to the public.  This exhibition is curated by artist Ashwini Bhat. It is Bhat’s curatorial intent that “with clay as at least one of their mediums, the 77th Scripps Annual artists are revisioning the possibilities for this, the most ancient artistic material. Their intuitive and thoughtful practices thrive on adding new vocabulary and syntax to the clay lexicon”. A range of approaches and materials came together to create works that include raw and fired clay, paper, concrete, paint, wire, wood, textile, sculpture, drawing, and performance.

For more information on the exhibition, please visit the Williamson Gallery’s website at https://rcwg.scrippscollege.edu/ or call (909) 607-3397. The gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 pm during exhibitions. Admission is free.

Dear Sahar,

A while back Daniel Nevers and I had a conversation about the possibility of an exhibition of artists from the Roll Up Project. We talked about how our lives infect and influence the art we make. The idea for the Midas show was how life and art intersect, and how the atmosphere and energy of the studio holds special secrets. Things we have gathered to look at. Ephemera born in the studio we hold onto. Collections of stuff we live with. Books we read. Music we listen to. Records we had (and may still have) years ago. Before music could be carried around in our pockets.

These memories, attitudes, objects, thoughts, feelings, are all part of the art we make. Our entire existence lives inside the art we make. This is the impetus or concept behind this show at the Berkeley Art Center. We live among other people. We thrive in a community, a neighborhood, and among other artists.

Artists possess the Midas touch. The story of turning something or someone into gold. Artists have always been alchemists.

The way in which things in the studio become art is a magical, mysterious thing. We hope that through this exhibit your artwork along with something that inspired or touched you in some way or burrowed itself into your art, and will share with the viewers a part of that studio secrecy. You can present new work or something that you think works with this premise. In my work, for example, it could be the TV, a newspaper clipping, or an object which shows up in my work. The candelabra is a good example. Matisse painted a picture of his studio and included all the paintings he had on his wall in miniature. Jasper Johns has used images of his bathtub faucet, George Ohr pottery, an old photograph of Lucien Freud, and a newspaper obituary. Joan Mitchell, the garden around her house in France as well as the one Monet cultivated.

Opening Reception: Saturday 15 January, 4pm to 7pm

“Please leave me alone. I’m dreaming.”

- Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Oakland CA based sculptor Sahar Khoury. Marking a second presentation at the gallery, Khoury debuts an ensemble of two- and three-dimensional landscape constructions in metal, ceramic, paper-mâché and wood pruned from the artists’ own walnut and apple trees.

Begun prior to though deeply influenced by time spent as an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Fall 2021, Khoury’s introduction of wood to her practice is one of seasonal maintenance turned material inquiry. While at the Headlands, Khoury brought pruned walnut branches from her yard and tension suspended them in the studio window. Those same branches find their way into the chandelier mobile that hovers over the main space in Orchard. Representational ceramic trees, akin to pages from a children’s book, oscillate between deciduous and evergreen.

Khoury’s work often reflects an exterior everydayness comprised of personal specificities. Within this fold the artist integrates elements of her interior environment to the exhibition. The sole human figure in the show is a paper-mâché and ceramic wall piece recreating a small segment of Khoury’s own living room rug. Lola, Khoury’s tuxedo cat, locally cast in aluminum by the artist, makes an appearance on a four-legged table in the front window of the gallery. Centered in the back room is a rectangular sculpture, a time machine of sorts, documenting an accumulation of cement and ceramic parts begun in 2017 and finished this year. The piece stands in stark contrast to the other works in color and scale but shares the common sensibility of a landscape in transition.

Sahar Khoury received her BA in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley. The artist was a recipient of the 2019 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Art Award, exhibiting at the museum from November 2019 through March 2020, and was also recently featured at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa CA, the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Khoury has exhibited extensively for two decades; this past year showing at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York NY, CANADA in New York NY and Friends Indeed Gallery in San Francisco CA. Khoury is included in the forthcoming Berkeley Arts Center exhibition Midas: How Art Becomes Life & Life Becomes Art, curated by Squeak Carnwath, and the 77th Scripps College Ceramic Annual, curated by Ashwini Bhat.

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Gallery hours: Thursday & Friday 12noon to 5pm

Or by appointment, schedule by phone or email - 415.800.7228, info@rebeccacamacho.com

Headlands Center for the Arts is pleased to announce the 46 artists and collaboratives awarded for its renowned Artists in Residence program for 2021, as well as cash awards for visual art, social practice, music, and writing—including two new awards from The Vita Brevis Club and the Gardner Family.

http://www.headlands.org/

What are our contemporary crises if not bodies reacting with and against other bodies? The Myth Industry explores our experience living in the aftermath of fundamental systemic concerns that are not new, but have existed for much longer than this era of activism is now only uncovering. This entanglement is part of a long history of capital that spins potent myths, shaping the way we think about each other and, in turn, the world around us.

The Myth Industry elaborates inquiries into subjects around the human condition. With a view to the peril and possibility of the current moment, the show brings together a range of voices that grapple with a world undergoing remarkable artistic, social, intellectual and political ferment.

What makes the dialogue so powerful is that it occurs in concert with the rise of street-based protests and on-the-ground movements in many parts of the world. As the U.S. emerges from the shadow of the pandemic, works from this show point to a fragility at the heart of American identity.

Guillermo Galindo, Mark Thomas Gibson, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sahar Khoury, Marissa Leshnov, Duane Linklater, Mario Moore, Michon Sanders, and Hank Willis Thomas

Best in Show

Trisha Baga, Miguel Cardenas, Tyler Dobson, Danny Ferrell, Jan Gatewood, Stephanie Temma Hier, Elizabeth Jaeger, Susumu Kamijo, Sahar Khoury, Zak Kitnick, Emma Kohlmann, Sophie Larrimore, Sean-Kierre Lyons, Nikki Maloof, Maija Peeples-Bright, Chloe Seibert
- Organized by Silke Lindner-Sutti

Jack Hanley Gallery is excited to present ‘Best in Show’, a group exhibition exploring the fascination with dogs in contemporary art. Since the beginnings of art history, the dog has been a common subject, from prehistoric cave paintings to mythological depictions, allegorical paintings of fidelity in the middle ages to hunting scenes or renaissance portraits promoting social status. The dog is a beast, a loyal companion, a protector, status symbol and with its intuition and hyper-sensitivity, alludes to unforeseen events. While often having played the supporting role, the dog has become an increasingly central subject since the standardization of dog breeds in the 19th century. Still today, perhaps more than ever, the dog has found a prominent place in contemporary art and culture, providing platforms to experiment with shape and colors, becoming humanoid hybrid, cute accessory, subject to serial image making and processing, innocent mascot or symbol of an egalitarian utopia.

A percentage of sales from the show will be donated to Animal Haven NYC

For more information, please contact Silke Lindner-Sutti at silke@jackhanley.com

The Bay Area has a longstanding tradition of radical experimentation in ceramic arts and, in recent years, many of the region’s most exciting young artists have chosen clay as their medium. This exhibition highlights three emerging artists working in this space, exploring a range of contemporary interventions in ceramic tradition.

GALLERY CANDICE MADEY

For its inaugural exhibition at 1 Rivington Street, Gallery Candice Madey is pleased to announce an exhibition There Will Come Soft Rains, presenting Igshaan Adams, Uri Aran, Athanasios Argianas, Chitra Ganesh, Ektor Garcia, Julia Haft Candell, Steffani Jemison, Rin Johnson, Sahar Khoury, Marlene McCarty, Diane Severin Nguyen, Em Rooney, and Didier William.

The exhibition title refers to a short story by Ray Bradbury published in The Martian Chronicles in 1950, in which a fully automated house continues its daily routines devoid of human life. The domestic setting symbolizes humanity’s more ambitious attempts to control time and the environment, and the disastrous outcome of excessive productivity, consumption, and competition. The story concludes with the mainframe repeating the same date and time endlessly, refuting linear concepts of time and progression; entropy and nature reclaim what remains of built human architecture.

Cloaca Projects is thrilled to present HOT CUE, a collaborative project between Sahar Khoury, Lara Sarkissian and Esra Canoğullari (Club Chai). For the exhibition, sculptural supports for CDJs that abstract the form of a DJ booth or podium will be constructed by Sahar Khoury for Club Chai to perform on.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced the 2019 recipients of its biannual SECA Art Award. Conferred this year on three Bay Area artists, the award has been the region’s most visible recognition program for contemporary artists since its inception in 1967.

The winners were chosen from among 16 finalists announced in December. They are Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Sahar Khoury and Marlon Mullen. Each artist will have a dedicated gallery in a three-person exhibition to be held at SFMOMA in November.

CANADA is pleased to present Afterhours, a solo exhibition by Sahar Khoury. Khoury makes sculptures that, upon first encounter, resemble vessels, baskets, screens and tapestries. These objects prefer distortion over function.  Although the sculptures are organized by the artist’s unique logic, they take pleasure in moments of material anarchy. Often these things or fragments get woven, fused with metal, coaxed upright and bent concave like pliant bodies.

One sculpture Untitled (cat with 13 belts) is made of three stacked ceramic vessels—red, black, and gold—each built with irregular cavities or protrusions. A cast bronze matte black cat poses at the top; her tail hovers weightlessly behind. (Khoury has sculpted her two cats many times, working directly from live poses and using paper and fabric to capture a rough sculptural form; this is her first time casting the forms in bronze.) Reinforcing the sculpture is a collection of tightly strung leather belts, their buckles and straps intertwine so that gold, pewter, and brown surfaces present in varying degrees of fashion, utility and bondage. 

In Untitled (1900-1999), Khoury presents a gate-like screen or portal. The surface is painted bone white, modulated, and sculpted into a window-like pattern. (The pattern is actually comprised of numerals, a whole century’s worth, scrunched together illegibly.) Inside, the object is collaged with reflective bike tape, light absorbs and bounces the characters, creating shadows and halos. 

These sculptures, pressed out of earth and a material curiosity, offer more mood than tangible narrative. Possibly we recognize their meaning through the body like feeling the weight of the cat on our laps or the cinch of a belt.

Holder

17 May through 6 July 2019

Opening reception: Thursday 16 May 2019, 6 to 8pm

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, a solo show of new work by Oakland-based artist Sahar Khoury.

Titled Holder, Khoury’s multi-media sculptures are armatures to house objects significant to the artists’ life - whether her own possessions or those pointing to others by whom she is inspired. With clear indications of hand and process reflected in the finished works, Khoury continues to create sculptures outside of structured methodology. Using materials such as ceramic, concrete, steel, paper-mâché, resin, cloth and leather to construct individual units that are puzzled and bolted together, the artist bypasses the traditional center of object making and inhabits a unique space that is aesthetically raw and purposefully unruly while also formally elegant, pure and emotionally beautiful.

With humor and intelligence, Khoury consistently infuses her practice with a larger social dialogue. Whether visible – the utilization of found or recycled objects to create recognizable cultural reference points; or discreet – the layering in of personal mementos, indistinguishable notations of time and place; Khoury’s works absorb the histories embedded in their discarded materials and reinvents them with new potential.

Recipient of the 2019 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Art Award, Khoury will exhibit at the museum from November 2019 through April 2020. She was also recently featured in the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries Part and Parcel and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Bay Area Now 8.

Opening reception: Friday, January 25, 6:00-8:00 PM

This spring marks forty years since the Iranian revolution disrupted a nation and laid the groundwork for global conflicts in the following decades. It resulted in millions of lives being displaced and dislocated, and initiated a shift in the politics of the region that deepened a complicated and precarious rift between conflicting ideologies, resulting in an ongoing exile for Iranians in diaspora across the world. 

The SFAC Galleries is pleased to present Part and Parcel, guest curated by renowned local artist, curator and educator Taraneh Hemami. As a member of the Iranian diaspora, Hemami was interested in fostering an exhibition that would take a look at geographies of belonging. What does it mean to belong? How do specific places affect our ability to be included or excluded from belonging? And how does one negotiate identity in a new space when dislocated from self-defining cultural, political, geographical, or social aspects from another? What role do desires to fit in and/or resist assimilation have in belonging?

The four featured artists, Tannaz Farsi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Sahar Khoury, and Minoosh Zomorodinia examine crossings and becomings, systems and processes, nature and language, time and histories, and remnants of the everyday, in their multidisciplinary projects.

Gelare Khoshgozaran, an interdisciplinary artist, and writer, was born and raised in Tehran and currently lives in Los Angeles. In her work, she envisions the city as an imaginary space between asylum as “the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee” and the more dated meaning of the word, “an institution offering shelter and support to people who are mentally ill.” Part and Parcel hosts a new installation by Khoshgozaran that harkens back to a previous project featuring internally-illuminated packages sent back and forth from California to Iran.

In Bay Area-based artist Minoosh Zomorodinia’s new two-channel video the artist is depicted standing alone in epic natural landscapes facing into strong winds that press a silver safety blanket against her body. Zomorodinia struggles against the gale to keep her body covered. Her resistance against forces beyond her control, and her determination to be both present and invisible at the same time, combine in ways that are powerful and at times humorous.

For her Bay Area debut, Oregon-based artist Tannaz Farsi will be installing works from her recent solo exhibition, Points of Departure. For a large wall-work, Farsi displays the names of Iranian women, historical and contemporary, creating a visible and accountable document of women's public intellectual labor in Iran and abroad. The names are spelled out in a custom font inspired by 10th century Arabic calligraphy.

Sahar Khoury, an Oakland-based artist, will be producing a new installation of hybrid sculptural works for the exhibition that bring attention to key historical dates in Iran/US relationship of the past four decades.

Part and Parcel and its partner exhibition Once at Present (March 29 - April 20, 2019), curated by Kevin B. Chen and Taraneh Hemami at Minnesota Street Project, are affiliate programs of the international conference,  Forty Years and More (March 28 - 30 2019), presented by the new Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at SFSU. https://ids.sfsu.edu/conference


Image credit: Minoosh Zomorodinia, Sensation, 2016-2018, two channel video installation (video still)

Nov 8 — Dec 16, 2018
Opening Reception
Thursday, November 8, 6–9 pm

Co-curated by Jehra Patrick, Law Warschaw Gallery Director and Curator, and Susannah Magers, an Oakland-based independent curator and writer, Material Futurity brings together contemporary artists from across the United States working in video, performance, sculpture, fiber, painting, digital projects, and mixed media. These artists’ practices prioritize re-working, mutability, potential, and fluidity—locating futurity, in conversation with the past and present, as a speculative and generative site.

Whether incorporating interdisciplinary or collaborative methodologies, appropriation, archival resource materials, or autobiographical narrative structures, this exhibition takes a humanist approach to imagine an abstracted, queer, and forward-looking space for inquiry and investigation. We see a common thread in process, with resistance to hegemonic or definitive outcomes, and a specific contextual commitment to intersectional, expansive approaches that critically imagine, access, or abstract the world we have as well as the world we want to live in.

Featuring recent work by Diedrick Brackens (Los Angeles, CA), Jeffrey Gibson (New York, NY), Sahar Khoury (Oakland, CA), Grace Rosario Perkins (Oakland, CA), Anna Luisa Petrisko (Los Angeles, CA), Chris Bogia (Queens, NY), Jade Yumang (Vancouver, BC, Brooklyn, NY, and Chicago, IL).

The only survey exhibition of its kind in Northern California, YBCA's signature triennial BAY AREA NOW returns in its eighth manifestation as a key component of YBCA's 25th anniversary season.

At a time when the challenges facing artists in the Bay Area continue to mount — from rising rents and displacement to too few venues that can elevate and support emerging artists — an exhibition that focuses on what is being created in studios across the region is not just desirable, but vital.

Selected through a process of studio visits conducted from fall 2017 through spring 2018, the exhibition showcases visual artists in a broad range of creative practices, including painting, photography, ceramics, textiles, video installation, and digital media. For the first time in its history, Bay Area Now also includes architects and designers working at the leading edge of environmental, landscape, and housing design.

The picture that emerges — of both the region and the artists who call it home — presents a resilient Bay Area, where humor and care come together with intimate reflections on individual and personal histories, and where bodies and geographies propose a fluid understanding of race, gender, and nature. Using materials as surrogates for gender and environmental politics, the participants point to an in-between space that, by rejecting rigid dichotomies, suggests a delicate optimism.

In celebration of the artists and curators who took part in previous editions, as well as the current state of YBCA as an institution, the exhibition research and text materials will include a look back at the history of Bay Area Now.

Artists:

Sadie Barnette, David Bayus, Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, Sofía Córdova, Caleb Duarte, Josh Faught, Darell W. Fields, Nicki Green, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Jamil Hellu, Constance Hockaday, Rhonda Holberton, Carrie Hott, Hyphae Design Laboratory, Sahar Khoury, Charlie Leese, modem, NEMESTUDIO, Woody De Othello, Marcela Pardo Ariza, Stamen Design, Taravat Talepasand, Urban Works Agency (UWA), Cate White, Andrew Wilson

http://www.wattis.org/view?id=529
Featuring works by Tauba Auerbach, Sarah Cain, Ajit Chauhan, Veronica DeJesus, Colter Jacobsen, Sahar Khoury, Alicia McCarthy, and Will Rogan.

Opening reception: Thursday March 15, 6:30–8:30 pm
7pm: Musical performance by The Dirty Ditches
Panel: Friday, March 23, 7:00 pm
Sarah Cain, Colter Jacobsen, and Sahar Khoury, and co-curator Maddie Klett have a conversation at the McRoskey Mattress Company.

Artwork for Bedrooms tells the story of eight artists living in San Francisco 2000–08, a period that until now has been framed by the Mission School, artists known for sprawling assemblages that took inspiration from graffiti culture. Artwork for Bedrooms draws a parallel narrative from the same moment of young artists who were similarly invested in “poor” materials, but who put them to work in more abstract, fragile, or conceptual ways.

Artwork for Bedrooms is curated by CCA’s Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice Class of 2018 Maddie Klett, Zhaoyu Lin, MK Meador, Cristiane Ulson Quercia, Rosa Tyhurst, and Qinyue Xu.

The Luggage Story Gallery is pleased to present dual solo exhibitions of the Oakland-based artists Sahar Khoury and Anne Walsh, opening February 18 and running through March 18.  Khoury will be showing new sculptures and paintings built from papier mache, concrete, ceramic, steel, bamboo, textiles, and found objects. Walsh will be showing a ten-minute video work titled “Anthem (Let it Go),” installed amidst walls papered with written, illustrated, and edited drafts of her genre-bending adaptation known as The Annotated Hearing Trumpet. Khoury and Walsh took the shared title THEY for their exhibitions in an act of communion with one another and as an expression of the teeming, clamoring, urgent mass of voices and forms that make up the works on view.  At the close of the exhibition, Walsh and Khoury will produce a collaborative publication with documentation, conversation, and writings on THEY works.

            Khoury’s THEY will fill the lofty third floor gallery, with an installation of her signature rough yet tender objects. Painted and glazed ceramic works, bed pillows deliberately shot through like target dummies, concrete encased masquerade masks gather in a central huddle. A small forest of number forms - 20th c. years which mark nationality and memory formation in Iranian and Palestinian histories - stands aside the central cluster of sculptures. A set of paintings, (6’ x 4’, 5’ x 5’)) made of dismembered clothing, newspaper and paper shopping bags are THEY’s wall objects. Khoury’s figuration in THEY moves confidently around and through a core of damaged, beloved, assertive and eternal bodies.

            Anne Walsh’s THEY is a quasi-documentary music video titled Anthem (shot 2014, completed 2015 and re-worked 2017) , conceived as a “chapter” of her ongoing, multi-year “adaptation” of Leonora Carrington’s utopian feminist fable The Hearing Trumpet. When Walsh learned that a local organization for older-age thespians would be teaching a musical theatre class featuring Let it Go, the hit song from Disney’s 2014 movie Frozen, she signed up for the class. Walsh reveals herself in Anthem as both stranger and native, ambivalent and curious in the re-making, re-embodying, re-mediation of a little girl’s manifesto by a troupe of (mostly) women, ages 65-80.

            Surrounding, containing, and contextualizing Anthem, the walls of Luggage Store’s second floor space are papered with Walsh’s writing and visual ephemera, a book-in-progress exploded and mapped from her studio to the gallery. Hand-written research notes, photographs of those notes, digitally-printed and hand-edited photographs of text, enlargements of the latter, and photographs and letters from Walsh’s friendship with Carrington, as well as her own self-imaging and research into the identity of an “Apprentice Crone” are the elements of Walsh’s affective universe

Sahar Khoury is an artist based in Oakland, California. She works mostly with found or rejected materials to produce painterly sculptures. Her constructions are made of a combination of paper mache, paint, textile, concrete, ceramic, and silkscreened materials. She received her BA in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996 and her MFA  From UC Berkeley in 2013.  She has exhibited in the Bay Area and nationally, most recently at the Oakland Museum of California and 2nd Floor projects.

Anne Walsh lives and works in Oakland. She frequently engages collaborators in the retelling of histories and the translating of texts, and this process of making, with its risks, desires, and failures, gives unstable shape to her completed work. Her performances, videos, sculpture and works on paper have been exhibited at Diapason, NYC; San Francisco Camerawork; Rosenbach Museum and Library (Philadelphia); Artists Space (NYC); Royal College of Art (London), Lothringer 13 (Munich), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and as part of the Hayward Gallery's (London) traveling exhibition program. She is faculty in the department of Art Practice at U.C. Berkeley.

Sahar Khoury | ZOO

I am transported to Dheisheh, a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories; designed 50 years ago to be temporary, this has become a permanent home for many. I’m walking up winding, unnamed streets narrowly sandwiched between crumbling walls, their exteriors covered with layers of faded posters and painted stencils. Concrete floors and tin roofs, exposed rebar and half-built cinderblock structures, rebuilt and repaired–everywhere is evidence of dislocation.

Sahar Khoury scours the urban landscape for castaways: security bars or fence posts that were discarded in favor of visually pleasing replacements, or disposed of altogether in the wake of demolition for a new building site. She reimagines this refuse— gathered nearby her West Oakland studio—to build her sculptures. The resulting work is not specific to any place, yet is insistently local–this is what is being thrown out. The work is able to exist out of place, yet be about place.

Luca Antonucci | The Custodian

In “The Custodian,” Luca Antonucci explores issues of authenticity and authorship of art. Starting from an obsession with art forgeries and their implications, Antonucci focused on the practice of art conservation for the work in his installation. The conservator is tasked with the impossible challenge of making an artwork last indefinitely but who inevitably alters the work in an attempt at preservation. Apt for a seasoned publisher, the core of Antonucci’s site-specific installation takes book form — one that cleverly employs ambiguity to frame a collection of found images that muddle the definition of art. Antonucci’s installation also challenges traditional display practices: while it is conventional to hang 2D work on a wall with a 60’’ center, said wall is traditionally facing the viewer.