Tag: Exhibitions

Pattern and Power, first exhibited at Anya Tish Gallery, is a series of paintings that utilize vibrant heritage-based patterns to bridge ordinary moments of modern life with concepts of philosophy, history, and storytelling. This particular collection of paintings associates 10th-16th-century poetic fables with mundane moments from contemporary life. Each painting is adorned with historically significant patterns influenced by Asian and American textile cultures, creating a narrative experience where decorative elements actively participate in the storytelling process.

The paintings delve into the visual possibilities that arise when tales like “The Case of the Animals versus Man” by Ikhwan al-Safa unfold in the present day. It explores possible relationships that can form between literary masterpieces originating from eastern oral traditions and the current visual art space. Traditionally, these fables often contained themes such as caring for nature, questioning social power structures, and combating the dissemination of falsehoods. The oeuvre examines how medieval fables from the continent of Asia continue to convey wisdom that transcends its cultural and geographical origins and remains relevant to this day.

Majority Rule is a group exhibition of artist featuring work from Leticia Bajuyo, Brandon Tho Harris, Kill Joy, Ruhee Maknojia, Anthony Pabillano, Jagdeep Raina, and Sajeela Siddiq curated by Erika Mei Chua Holum at Sanman Studios.

The Exhibition draws on storytelling, myth-making, and survival strategies of South and Southeast Asian artists in Houston to consider forms of connected knowledge in the Global South, such as warm-weather solidarities, humid climates, and tropical futures as a way to preserve and elevate artistic practices located within and along cultural political, and geographic peripheries. Ranging from rapidly dissolving coastlines to tropical paradieses, the artists and communities along seacoasts, archipelagos, and oceanic geographies have sustained and preserved ways of coming together even amidst displacement, diaspora, and migration. Throughout the show, the artworks and activations propose “looking south” as a method of resistance to hegemonic solutions driven by perspectives from the global north.

Locating the estuaries, bayous, and swamplands of Houston as spaces of hybrid climates, biodiversity, and cultural plurality, we look toward majority-initiated survival to imagine a future for ourselves. Majority Rule is an invocation of community- building through a variety of mediums- the exhibition space, the dinner table, the artist workshop, and the conversation

between friends and strangers- as a way to speculate beyond individualism, scarcity, and catastrophe towards conviviality, communality, and connectedness.

On 11th March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Uncertain how long the pandemic would last or how threatening it would be to American citizens, the artist, Ruhee Maknojia, stamped one red flower for every American life lost to the virus from 11th March 2020 to 31st December 2021. The Stamped flowers symbolically illustrate human fragility. Eventually the data collection process transformed into an art installation titled, “One Flower | One Life” 

The installation of parchment paper hanging from the ceiling to floor was first exhibited at Box 13 ArtSpace in Houston, TX. The paper displays flowers for every American life lost to COVID-19 and a date marking the number of individuals who passed on a particular day. The project is here to help viewers grapple with the magnitude of lives lost by visualizing over 900,000 of them as small stamped flowers and what that might mean for those who experience the installation. Due to size constraints of the exhibition space. The installation and following images only show a small fraction of COVID-19 deaths. Viewers are currently looking at those lives lost from 11th March 2020 to 24th July 2020, totaling 137,678 flowers | lives.