CURATOR’S STATEMENT

This work evolves from an obsessiveness and immersion in the process of making, something like hunger. For me, the works embody a tension between being fully realized abstract drawings or objects and disintegrating into their many components. The pieces are not narrations, but they embody time and the presence of the artist and the artist’s hand. The works also represent courage to me, in that they are unique gestures and self-referential.

Each of the artists is entirely devoted to their practice and has created specific methodologies for addressing their mediums, pushing the physicality of their object to an almost dramatic level. For example, Xi Nan uses translucent porcelain to sculpt tiny components that interlock, creating mini-machines that fit into one’s palm. Kim Bennett plays a type of “drawing chess” with her son: each makes a mark in response to the other, which Kim then embroiders by hand onto large forms. Joyce Nojima works between additive and subtractive processes, making marks with graphite, unique papers, embossing devices, and flame. James Sansing works with sculptural installation using a mixture of organic objects and heavy industrial materials that waver within a state of entropy. Arthur Huang's beatific daily drawings map “memory walks” and commuting, capturing the wonder in the mundane. He translates these drawing on eggshells that are installed suspended within networks of string. Sandra Ono uses everyday objects to create freestanding and wall-hung immersive organic perceptual wonders that defy names.

The devotion to a practice that is ongoing, timeless, and with no particular “use” feels important during a time of political unrest and social chaos.

—Mel Prest

About the Artists

KIM BENNETT operates within a reimagined art history — as if women’s work had always been considered important and need not be revised. This fictive history provides a jumping off point for her textile-based practice, in which she explores female creative production through embroidery.

ARTHUR HUANG explores conscious and unconscious everyday memory along the spectrum of neuroscience and visual arts through two ongoing projects — the Memory Walks Project and the Daily Drawings Project.

In XI NAN’s view, we subconsciously design and reside in our own psychological spaces, as well as in reality. She is fascinated by architecture and mechanical apparatuses, which serve as metaphorical devices for her to reflect, express, and evaluate her artwork and her inner world. In her sculptural and performing work, Xi invites viewers to experience the fragility and vulnerability of her anxiety, as well as to reflect upon their own inner struggles.

JOYCE NOJIMA punctures, disfigures, welds, and draws with a heated iron rod. Tentative gestures are interrupted by thick yet translucent scars. These marks echo the dichotomy between rhythm and atonality, thoughtfulness and impetuousness. She searches for beauty in destruction, becoming lost in the surfaces she creates.

SANDRA ONO’s work is informed by biology, physiology, and politics. She often uses synthetic and ubiquitous utilitarian products that come in close contact with our bodies — such as bandages, earrings or eye shadow — and transforms those materials to construct biomorphic forms that give weight and dimension to metaphorical internal states.

JAMES SANSING explores the balance between several dichotomies: abstract and narrative, nature and human-made, heavy and fragile. When he starts a sculpture, it is an abstract work focused on form, line, and color to create a composition. Although there is no set story, dystopia is a common theme — a landscape where nature and relics of an organized society merge to create a landscape of chance.