Sahar Khoury

Sculptor Sahar Khoury (b. 1973, Chicago, IL) emphasizes the virtues of the improvisational and the makeshift in purposefully off-kilter works that are amalgams of a range of media and techniques.

Using an intuitive approach to composition, she employs media promiscuously, working in ceramic, concrete, papier-mâché, resin, textiles, paint, metal, and wood, among others.

Additionally drawing on objects found in her lived environment in Oakland, CA, Khoury reacts to cast-off materials that she describes as “rejected, ubiquitous, unwanted” including belts, items of furniture, and plastic laundry baskets. Often, she uses existing objects as molds or surfaces off of which to take reliefs, creating positive forms that appear repeatedly across bodies of work. By using materials instinctively and spontaneously, Khoury insists on a slapstick and humor-filled approach.

Khoury frequently embeds conspicuous mechanisms of display (such as shelves, handles, and hooks) into the works themselves, dramatizing their structure in a cheeky way. Sometimes, such elements allude to structural purpose but don’t necessarily have one. Her sculptures might join papier-mâché numerals, ceramic armatures, and casts of found objects that all hang gingerly and tenderly together. According to Khoury: “My natural inclination is to make unity out of unlikely materials. So maybe that is what I am interested in, points of unity rather than purity, purity just doesn’t exist in my worldview.” In foregrounding improvisation in her work, Khoury avoids standard methods, fixed meanings, and codified forms of knowledge. Instead, she materially modelsa playful and limber method of making and moving through the world.

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