You Can't Cut It Into Pieces - Canada Online Viewing Room

Canada

Mar 11, 2022 - Apr 9, 2022

60 Lispenard Street

P: 212 925 4631

New York, NY

10013

canadanewyork.com

Sahar Khoury: You Can't Cut It Into Pieces

Installation view of Sahar Khoury You Can't Cut It Into Pieces

Portrait of Sahar Khoury

“I decided to call it You Can’t Cut It Into Pieces. You have to swallow all the parts whole. There is the material diversity and the me diversity and all the fragments bound together, and I don’t want any one part to be spotlighted as more meaningful or useful. Take it or leave it." - Sahar Khoury

Canada is pleased to present, You Can’t Cut It Into Pieces, a one person show by Sahar Khoury. The show is a series of wall based and free-standing sculpture that employ color, ranging from high chroma to earthy, an insistently improvisational construction techniques and found objects from the everyday world. Untitled (falafel column), features a lattice of wobbly greenish ceramic loops crowned by two clay falafels. The effect is loose, rhythmic and evokes culture, both high and low, without hierarchy. The variety and inventiveness keep the viewer moving from piece to piece, surprises await in each sculpture and in the installation as a whole.

For example, Untitled (scaffolded tables with trees), is an all-white metal and glass display structure that holds two strange cartoony ceramic trees. Similarly full of vexing pleasures is Untitled (red with belts) a complex boat-like tabletop tower that feels like a cross section of something, topped with a red belted tangle. Each piece asks the viewer to slow down and trace the artists ideas, touch and omnivorous collection of worldly material. The delight of the sculpture is that the viewer may walk away with more questions than answers, taking with them Khoury’s wry humor and sense of possibility into the world with them.

Sculptor Sahar Khoury (b. 1973, Chicago, IL) emphasizes the virtues of the improvisational and the makeshift in purposefully off-kilter works that are amalgams of a range of media and techniques. Using a cooperative approach to composition, she employs media promiscuously, working in ceramic, concrete, metal, papier-mâché, and textiles, among others. Additionally drawing on objects found in her lived environment in Oakland, CA, Khoury reacts to cast-off materials that she describes as “rejected, ubiquitous, unwanted.” Primarily concerned with experimentation and assemblage, Khoury avoids standard methods, fixed meanings, and codified forms of knowledge. Instead, she materially models a reflexive and limber method of indexing her lived experience into sculpture and installation.

Trained as an anthropologist and working for many years on community-based research projects concerning structural vulnerability within Latinx migrant labor communities, Khoury did not receive a formal art education until later in her career. Rather, she developed her practice within the Bay Area’s queer community of the late 1990s and 2000s, making works for music shows, theater performances, and street protests. Khoury’s work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (where she was the recipient of the 2019 SECA Art Award), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Oakland Museum of California, the Wattis Institute, UC Berkeley Art Museum, Scripps 77th Ceramic Annual, Rebecca Camacho Projects, and CANADA Gallery. She received her BA in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996 and her MFA From UC Berkeley in 2013.

Untitled (granite charm in caged column), 2022
Ceramic, powdered coated steel, granite, stainless steel
74 3/4 × 18 1/2 × 15 in.

Untitled (2021 - 2030), 2022
Ceramic
41 3/4 × 23 1/4 × 5 3/4 in.

Untitled (seven Esthers belted to a chair), 2022
Ceramic, powder coated steel, belt
24 3/4 × 18 1/4 × 19 in.

Installation view of Sahar Khoury You Can't Cut It Into Pieces

Untitled (leaning column with two poppies), 2022
Ceramic, powder coated steel, bronze
54 × 24 1/2 × 12 1/2 in.

Untitled (Orientalism charm with TV tray), 2020-2022
Steel, powder coated steel, ceramic, cement, wire, paper and textile mâché, resin
66 1/2 × 37 × 23 1/2 in.