The Armory Show | Presents BOOTH P13
Sahar Khoury creates off-kilter works that are layered with social, political and cultural signifiers. In this presentation of new work created for The Armory Show 2024, Khoury addresses imperialism and resistance through imagery and symbols rooted in both the universal and the biographical, utilizing core materials and compositional strategies that anchor her practice overall.
In a duo of works that mix three-dimensional sculpture and traditional wall-based presentation, bent and welded steel rods are shaped into armatures with a crosshatch of wire compositions running throughout. Each composition is encased in metal, clay, and papier-mâché, creating a screen with densely interdependent lines hovering between scar tissue and aerial landscapes. Seen in juxtaposition, these double-sided paintings offer two distinctive views or windows onto the world. In Untitled (Window with yellow and carrot charm), strands of pigmented pulp are interwoven in a standardized grid. Ceramic carrots are enmeshed within and dangle freely from the composition adding a humorous and playful moment. Untitled (Window with red and long hook) is, by contrast, comprised of strands of paper pulp and wires that energetically zig zag within the confines of their metal framing. These tightly held, wrapped, and intertwined strands signal to the mapping of movements, constrained, clashing, and harmonious all at once.
In dialogue with the hanging works is a series of mixed media sculptural crowns comprised of clay, resin and steel. The head adornment worn by monarchs, crowns symbolize power and hierarchy across histories and cultures throughout the world, asserting the privileged position of the wearer. Khoury's crowns are sculptural objects, intentionally stripped of their functionality to be worn, rendering them purely ornamental. The gems and jewels one typically finds in a crown have been replaced by chunks of colored resins embedded into the sides of each work. The glaze, washes, and reliefs in the crowns are patinaed to emphasize their densely textural surfaces that hold a gaudy and architectural aura. Positioned atop acrylic pedestals one would typically find in a museum, Khoury furthers the notion that these articles are only for display and prompts the viewer to consider the symbols we use to delineate power.
A series of porcelain wall-based works rounds out The Armory Show presentation. Made by a complex method of printing silkscreened altered images of selections of the artist's living room rug onto the surface of each work using underglaze, these small-scale porcelain fragments reveal as much as they conceal. A gift from a family friend, Khoury's rug boasts the unusual composition typical of the Afghanistan region and incorporates renderings of a woman with wings which continues to be a source of inquiry for the artist. The images culled from the patterned rug never fully coalesce, rather seem "out of place", as one piece has printed on its border, a reference to the title of Edward Said's memoir. Rooted in rupture, the works mirror the oft-complex histories of journeys across time and place.
