The house is on fire.
tabernacle explores mobility, impermanence and collective action in a time of instability. Drawing from wandering domiciles, roaming connections, or places of worship which are adaptable, portable, and responsive to their environment, the included artists, Boz Deseo Garden, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), Andre Keichian and Miller Robinson, are each journey-based, nomadic makers of communal, public ceremonies, and contemplative, solitary rituals.
Like the turtle who carries her home on her own back, this is an unstable exhibition, offering a durational architecture through photography, sculpture, text and performance. tabernacle is as much about interiority as housing, inviting reconsideration of the structures which bind us, how we hold space for others, and the malleability of ideological and material containers.
Words and curation by Matthew Lax
deviations of a scattered line
4x5 glass photographic plate fused with sand from the Pacific shoreline, palm wood, sand, chalk line
excavation sight
wall etching, chalk line
Salt in the I is an ongoing project of site-responsive photographs and objects composed for framing, viewing, and place-setting.
This projectprocesses the artist’s family’s history of displacement and diaspora through elementa changes that occur when salt, water, and wood frame a past that remains ungraspable. This installation’s ethos came from a recently encountered family photo album, whose migratory mapping traverses across the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Armenia), to France, Argentina, and the United States. Keichian’ Armenian born and, later, Argentine citizen grandfather photographed all the source materials for this work. Although they never met, this speculative collaboration draws a warped line between two peopl separated by time, land and sea. The work speaks of presence and absence through an exchange of both tangible and ephemeral temporalities, which move through distance and time. Keichian explores speculative interpretations of what an archive can do, rather than limiting memory to representatio defined by familial trauma. This exhibition plays with many unknowns that cling to the artist’s genealogy, giving a bent look through salt in their eye as they try to traverse oceans of time. This work is a speculative dip into the negatives that make up Keichian’s family’s history, looking askew to find queer stances and lost topographies.
This work has been shown in multiple iterations.
Below:
Table Gallery, Chicago, IL, 2019 Images: Kim Becker
Below:Tactics of Erasure and Rewriting Histories, installation view, 2022. Courtesy of Craft Contemporary
Photos: Josh Schaedel
Below:
ReflectSpace, 2023, Glendale Central Library, Glendale, CA
