Salome Kokoladze

  • Kenneth Tam, Why do you abuse me, 2022, epoxy resin, dirt, sand, dried mushrooms, dried seaweed, dried bamboo shoots, dried jujube, dried goji berries, preserved apricots, sunflower seeds, dried roots, dried sweet potato, and steel, 30 x 30 x 1 1/2".
    picks February 22, 2023

    Kenneth Tam

    In a video interview with the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University, Connie Young Yu, whose paternal great-grandfather was a laborer on the first transcontinental railroad in the US, built in the late nineteenth century, shares stories about her relative. One of them involves the Chinese workers who lived in the labor camps around Northern California: They would go into the Sierra Foothills to look for the remains of other men who were killed during the railroad’s construction, according to stories from her father. This effort to find the deceased is different

  • View of “Baseera Khan: Weight on History,” 2022.
    picks July 18, 2022

    Baseera Khan

    History has a long tradition of being recorded and passed down for generations via song and poetry. “Weight on History,” Baseera Khan’s first solo exhibition in Houston, is a lyrical, psychedelic meditation on contemporary pop culture, queerness, the immigrant imagination, and the past.

    One of the most striking and monumental pieces here is Painful Arc (Shoulder-High), 2022, a twelve-foot-eight-inch-high sculpture of an Islamic arch that, via Khan’s ingenious rendering, provides critical insight into historical architecture, sound, and subjectivity. These structures possess an important acoustic

  • Preetika Rajgariah, you are the master of your judgements, your decisions, and your actions, 2022, acrylic and latex paint, saris on yoga mats, 58 × 120".
    picks May 18, 2022

    Preetika Rajgariah

    Preetika Rajgariah’s exhibition “Pleasure Tense” offers a delicate layered inquiry into the connections between touch, texture, and selfhood. The artist collages family and community-sourced saris onto recycled yoga mats to create, according to the show’s press release, a form of “pleasure centered” queer self-portraiture that defies the othering gaze of the white heterosexual patriarchy. Most of the saris Rajgariah uses are thin and translucent, and from afar have a paint-like quality. Yet the artworks demand our scrutiny to reveal their distinct textures and surfaces. The artist’s physical

  • David Meskhi, Dance, 2021, permanent pigment print on hanemuhle baryt paper, 23 1/2 x 17".
    picks February 15, 2022

    David Meskhi

    The defining moments of evolutionary history have often occurred when an organism exchanged one space (let’s say water) for another (the land or the sky.) To imagine the body anew, sometimes we simply need to alter the environment in which it exists. David Meskhi’s series “Color of Weightlessness,” 2016-21, poses an existential as well as physiological query: who would we be if we could fly? Diverging from the artist’s earlier projects When the Earth Seems to be Light, 2006-2016, and Higher, 2004-2011, the images here stray even further from documentation. While Meskhi returns to his recurrent