exhibition brochure (PDF) - Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ...

Sahar Khoury
Sahar Khoury’s newest works, accumulative yet delicate compositions of found
and discarded materials—scraps and notes, bits of fabric, fragments of stretcher
bars, repurposed canvas—emphasize touch and their status as products of the
human hand. The artist’s expansive structures revel in the liminal and the inbetween:
they erase the boundaries between studio and artwork, between functional
space and lived space, cast and object, presence and mimesis, between
wall and floor and ceiling. She turns this ontological confusion of figure and
ground into the very essence of her practice. The surfaces of Khoury’s works are
like topographical maps born from the ever-changing ecosystem of her studio.
Khoury’s working process is one of continual rearrangement. A piece might
start as part of a wall—layered accumulations literally attached to and growing
out of her studio’s surfaces—then live for a while as autonomous form after
having been torn free, and later might be reincorporated into another composition.
Other works start as papier-mâché casts, accrue layers of matter and
paint, and have elements screwed and unscrewed, bound, nailed, taken off,
plastered over. This cycle of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction,
of displacement and relocation, celebrates not only process and artistic labor,
but also partial knowledges, the tentative and the slightly off-kilter. The resultant
“structural vulnerability,” to use the artist’s own words, that characterizes
her finished works swaps still-potent mythologies of progress and functionality
for a perennial state of impermanence and, paradoxically, a laconic thereness.
Khoury’s halting and beautifully imperfect works breed an acute awareness
of the present in which experiencing the now surfaces as an insurgent act.
Sahar Khoury: Plates and Ball on Shelf, 2012; papier-mâché, inkjet print, leather, acrylic paint; dimensions variable;
courtesy of the artist.