Alabaster

Drew Escriva, Gabriela Forgo, Rashid Johnson, Ajay Kurian, Johnny Le, Michele Lorusso, Muna Malik, Sagarika Sundaram

Curated by R. Parmar

"LIKE this alabaster box whose art

Is frail as a cassia-flower, is my heart,

Carven with delicate dreams and wrought

With many a subtle and exquisite thought.

Therein I treasure the spice and scent

Of rich and passionate memories blent

Like odours of cinnamon, sandal and clove,

Of song and sorrow and life and love."

—Alabaster by Sarojini Naidu

Alabaster brings together a diverse set of practices ranging from textiles and photography to ceramics and installations. In collaboration with Artist Curated Projects, the exhibition includes earlier works by Rashid Johnson, Ajay Kurian, and Gabriela Forgo, and new works by Johnny Le, Sagarika Sundaram, Muna Malik, Michele Lorusso, and Drew Escriva. Each artist introduces a distinct poetic vernacular to collective and personal histories, memory and identity. These complicated and fraught concepts are immediately sensed in the visceral, psychic and materiality of the works presented.

The exhibition begins with a hollowed ceramic that suggests bodily curves, by Gabriela Forgo. The vessel is filled with jasmine, a plant native to both India and California, tying together Naidu’s poem and the exhibition site. The fragrant and enduring hinoki wood that frames Johnny Le’s photographs of measurements of transience also acknowledges the poem’s sensorium as time.

Several of the works include materials culled from cultural and autobiographical signifiers or everyday objects. Ajay Kurian’s silkscreen of ghee, unrecognizable in a sheath of mica dust, recalls the haziness of the unknown in what seems to be known. Rashid Johnson’s cosmological mapping traces the infinite unknown of love and beyond. The spiral-like form that makes up a dizzying star-dotted universe both illuminates and gives way to the existential.

Similarly, Muna Malik challenges perception in an installation that centers fragility and fracture. A torn net with scattered feathers is held up by ceramic masks and a flag pole with no flag.

Rife with rips and the weavings that hold a constructed whole together, Malik’s installation ex- plores various forms of allegiances, cultural inheritance, and belonging. Such engagement is also reflected in the mirrored surfaces in Michele Lorusso’s various works, beckoning viewers to think speculatively, visually and textually on existence and impermanence. Drew Escriva’s hand-printed photographs layer color negative, photogram, and light painting to shift understandings of images’ relationship to reality.

Sagarika Sundaram’s new layered textile composition is made from hand-dyed wool felt and implies the form of a flower. The binding of the work’s petalled forms draws from the tradition of erotic Sangam poetry while the yellow edges references the Cassia flower in Naidu’s poem — which is abundant to the valley of Sundaram’s hometown in Southern India.

Together, the artists invite viewers to share in new perspectives through embodied considerations of material and form.