Mar 11, 2022 - Apr 9, 2022

60 Lispenard Street

P: 212 925 4631

New York, NY

Sahar Khoury: You Can't Cut It Into Pieces

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

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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.

RYPR2021-018-5

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.

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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. 

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

Untitled (vessel on shelf), 2022
Ceramic, powder coated steel
15 3/4 × 29 1/4 × 7 in.

Untitled (scaffolded tables with trees), 2022
Powder coated steel, glass, ceramic
76 1/2 × 72 1/4 × 54 3/4 inches (quantity of 3)

Untitled (keffiyeh football), 2022
Ceramic
8 × 5 3/4 × 8 3/4 in. 

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SK-Install-3

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

JF2021-install-01-1

Untitled (falafel column), 2022
Ceramic, bronze, powder coated steel
58 1/4 × 19 3/4 × 12 1/4 in. 

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Untitled (yellow pair 2), 2022
Ceramic, bronze, steel
14 1/8 × 9 3/4 × 2 in. 

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Untitled (yellow shelf with spoons), 2022
Powder coated steel, applewood
8 1/2 × 21 1/2 × 14 in. 

Untitled (black walnut tree on yellow stool), 2022
Ceramic, bronze, powder coated steel
34 1/4 × 15 × 12 1/4 in. 

Untitled (red with belts), 2022
Ceramic, belts, powder coated steel
38 3/4 × 15 3/4 × 15 in. 

Untitled (Friskies box on yellow shelf), 2022
Ceramic, papier-mâché, pigment, resin, wire
11 3/4 × 17 × 6 in. 

Untitled (middle section of my living room rug, 2022
Ceramic, papier-mâché, pigment, resin
25 3/4 × 15 3/4 × 1 1/4 in. 

Selected Works

Dream SpeakRachel Eulena Williams

ZzyzxChristina Sucgang

HomesickSadie Laska

Promised LightLuke Murphy

ReadersKiyoshi Tsuchiya

ComeCloseJoan Snyder

NocturnesAnke Weyer

Arms and the SeaKatherine Bradford

Objet OuttaKen Resseger

Last LandscapesGerald Ferguson

Leroy's LuncheonAzikiwe Mohammed

Frisson CityLee Relvas

Reassembler 3Brian Belott

A Ball is for ThrowingElizabeth McIntosh

Ambient MusicLee Mary Manning

TORSOAnnabeth Marks

BiscuitLyric Shen

Body ForthMatt Connors

A Cliff to ClimbRyan Preciado

Library of a DreamRobert Janitz

Gold GoldRJ Messineo

On ValentinesSpencer Lewis

Who is afraid of Natasha?Joanna Malinowska & CT Jasper

USMichael Mahalchick

TRANSFIGURATIONAurora Pellizzi

The Thick StreamGroup Exhibition

5 SeasonsJason Fox

Mother PaintingsKatherine Bradford

Ceramics and PrintsElisabeth Kley

Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm curated by Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle

#VayaConDiosKatherine Bernhardt

DrawingsJason Fox

Heart, HeartAnke Weyer

Tracing MemoryRachel Eulena Williams

Rayos De SombraRobert Janitz

GorpTyson Reeder

EREHWONSadie Laska