Familial Technologies

Sun-dried mud bricks, foods fermented for preservation, these are some resourceful Familial Technologies passed down through generations, a subject explored in the namesake group show featuring works by Cayetano Ferrer, Gala Porras-Kim, Kang Seung Lee, Lotus L. Kang, rafa esparza, and Rose Salane.

The exhibition borrows its title from Jennifer Moon’s 2018 show at the gallery, where the artist explored identities and emotions as technologies. Our senses of self and predilections—how we look at the world, how we process information (say, with annotations on Post-its)—are often learned from the family unit, the first community we belong to. Works in the exhibition reveal inherited wisdom, know-how, and technes, imbibed and mimicked like a language.

Perhaps significant, all artists are third culture kids, whose development was forged in the frisson of cultural and linguistic difference. They are interested in looking into the gaps, the margins; the loamy mud of lack, of precarity, of displacement becomes the ground for experimentation and ingenuity. Tracing ghosts of memories from personal and communal archives interconnected and splitting in rhizomatic ways, the artists in Familial Technologies unearth outcroppings of (hi)stories buried. The alchemy from the margins turning pungent shame and deracination into fortitude and care.

The lotus plant is a resilient creature of the mud, germinating horizontally in silty waters and projecting vertically towards sunlight and bloom. Lotus L. Kang, the artist, also revels in the mucky waters of entropy. She regards the body as web-like, permeable and labile, and imbues a similar logic in her studio processes. Mesoderm works combine flesh-hued silicone with drawings made on photographic paper with darkroom materials. Gestural strokes both trace and distort scenes from personal and historical photographs, and street views across New York and Seoul, becoming fleeting vestigial snapshots of histories embodied and inherited, over diasporic distances.

Mother (Spore, 2022-2023) spreads across the gallery floor. Kang views her proclivity towards the floor and the horizontal as both a formal means to betray linear narratives, as well as an inherited condition from her paternal grandmother who had a seed and grain shop in Seoul after fleeing North Korea. Stainless steel bowls, both ubiquitous in markets and specific in Korean households for kimchi production, hold aluminum casts of foods like cabbage, anchovies, and lotus tubers, steeping in viscous silicone. A constellation of memories pooled together, the vessels bear visceral residues redolent of, though pointedly unfaithful to, ideas of inheritance and motherland(s), suggesting a constant state of ferment, like our bodies, which through aging and decay become porous carriers of memory and time.

rafa esparza harnesses the Brown technology of mud. The artist grew up hearing stories about how his father had built the family home back in Durango, Mexico out of adobe. Following a fissure in the relationship caused by the artist’s queer proclivities, esparza asked his father to teach him how to make adobe. Adobe making is almost always a communal affair. The time spent together engaging in material conversation (if not so much verbal) mended the father and son’s relationship, forming a stronger bond embracing imperfection like kintsugi. The artist laid down the adobe bricks in banqueta at the entrances into the gallery, a sidewalk inviting us to step on and feel the sun-dried earth of Los Angeles on our feet. Over the course of the exhibition, our haptic encounters will leave their marks on the mud bricks—family tradition, indigenous technology, metonym for Brown bodies for the artist—perhaps even cracks that hold their own meaning and potential for restoration.

Cracks formed on a harder material occupy the interests of Cayetano Ferrer and Gala Porras-Kim. Marble is formed through metamorphism, Mother Nature’s alchemy producing the crystalline, porous rock, which have clad our architecture for millenia. In Quarry Composite works, Ferrer reconstructs marble fragments collected from various places, including casinos and hotels in Las Vegas, the hyperreal uncanny valley where the artist spent his adolescent years. The marmoreal rehabilitations reflect the artist’s longtime engagement with museum display architecture and restoration practices, and nod to a sensibility developed in youth as he observed how his father completed tile compositions. Incomplete shards are adjoined by infill fastidiously rendered digitally and printed on PVC, conflating the real and artificial. Patching the gaps and missing information, Ferrer negotiates a restoration of relations between disparate discarded fragments, reiterating the axiom that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Imperfections on marble—hairline cracks, mismatched colors—are faithfully drawn in Gala Porras-Kim’s San Vitale, Ravenna, marble floor reconstruction. The checkerboard pattern tells the Byzantine influence in the Italian city. More important to the artist are close readings of uncatalogued histories—of care and neglect, conservation and flawed restoration of the marble floor over the centuries of its life—divulged in colored pencil. Porras-Kim’s sharp eye was whetted during time spent with her historian father as a child visiting archives and museums. He would give her task games to play, to spot patterns and anomalies, to taxonomize and reorder. The artist applies the same mix of creativity and rigor now to various repositories of knowledge, not taking for granted that information presented by institutions of arts and sciences are always correct or fair, and posing questions about epistemological methodologies. The suite of drawings like One clump of feathers of in bag with Post-it index, in title and image, unidentified objects lying fallow in the Fowler Museum’s collection. Undefined and undeciphered, the objects have lost their cataloging number, stuck in a quasi-purgatory of the museum’s collection. Post-it notes at times accompany the recondite objects, guessing at their provenance or purpose. The annotations recall her father’s workspace and mode of thinking, illustrated by his computer screen wreathed in polychromatic Post-it notes.

Methodical research into unfrequented crevices of archives also impels the work of Rose Salane. The artist mines the evanescent, often mundane, imprints left on objects by everyday people. By agglomerating these objects, such as unclaimed rings in the lost and found office of New York City’s transit system or fragments taken from and returned to (often with contrite letters) the ruins in Pompeii, Salane locates poignant, intimate vestiges amidst the quotidian exchanges of contemporary urban life. Summer 2006, American Stock Exchange, 86 Trinity Place reproduces found maintenance records for the HVAC system at the financial securities marketplace. These prosaic vignettes silkscreened together gets abstracted into an elegant grid form from a distance, the beauty of analytical frameworks evoking the cryptic magical language of numbers and symbols the artist observed from her father’s work as a mathematician. Closer scrutiny of the piece reveals minute deviations from the rote logs betraying human wit. The ghosts of the invisibilized labor that allowed thousands to work at the now defunct financial halls of power.

Kang Seung Lee’s work bridge Familial Technologies with the show VISITOR-VISITEUR by Tseng Kwong Chi next door. A graphite drawing Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi, Cape Canaveral, Florida, 1985) depicts a photograph by the late artist Tseng, his own transient body rendered as a poof of smoke. The frame of the photograph is also drawn. On the white margin of the image reads a message, “Happy Birthday Keith,” a small clue to its provenance as a token of queer kinship between Tseng and Keith Haring. Inheritances from chosen families and fugitive spirits haunt Lee’s work, underscoring the power of communal care, even amidst the ravages of a deadly epidemic. Another work by Lee pays tribute to artists lost to AIDS, Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, and their relationship that was both artistic and romantic. A drawing of  Hujar’s photograph, Paul Thek at the Palermo Catacombs (1963) with Thek’s body erased is accompanied by an embroidery sewn in 24K gold thread. It replicates a page from Thek’s journal, banners festooned on the page with the phrase “get over yourself” repeated five times like a mantra. Maybe Thek’s exhortation can be a familial technology too, to build a collective memory brick by brick, where we lie and become part of a fertile ground for the future, long after our discrete fragile bodies return to earth.