Sahar Khoury
You Can't Cut It Into Pieces, Mar 11 – Apr 9, 2022

By Larry Rinder and Colter Jacobsen

CHEW LOW

SWALLOW LA

WHOLE HOLE

FIELD GOAL

Sahar asked me and Colter Jacobsen, my partner, to write something about her show in part because her current work plays with the idea and energy of couples.

BOLT ESTHER

PING PONG

PART PARTNER

PARMESAN LOAF

There isn’t much in Sahar’s recent work that reads overtly as pertaining to couples. Perhaps the closest she comes is a pair of cast bronze opium poppy stems--a sly nod to Jasper John’s famous pair of Ballantine Ale Cans--that poke out from the top of a precarious tower of filigreed ceramic. And the double-headed snake-like wooden spoons carved from an apple tree outside Sahar’s studio suggests how awkward togetherness can sometimes be.

There is another ceramic tower that she has adorned with two bronze falafel balls. These hint at coupledom, though they read equally as simple ornamental finials; that is, until you find two more half-eaten falafels (also in bronze) hiding elsewhere on the sculpture, at which point they are revealed as unquestionably gastronomic.

MOLDY ORANGE

PATINA PERSIAN

BLACK LIME

MOLDS HOLD

As Sahar’s title for the show (You Can’t Cut It Into Pieces) suggests, the kind of couple explored here is one that is indivisible. If you are in a relationship and you have a regular day, the sort of things that might stand out are the blueberry in your breakfast cereal that was a little bit off, the funny way your cat held its paw over its eyes, the cover of a book your partner got in the mail, or a golden net you saw in a dream: none of it is that important but you can’t take any of it away.

FALAFEL TREE

SPRING MATTRESS

SPIRAL BILABIAL

IDENTITY DIGESTED

All couples are precarious and incomprehensible. Somehow, they hold together. Through love, I guess, though other things come into it, like animals and sharing the passage of time. One sculpture features Sahar’s half-blind poodle, Esther, who appears in multiple, one poodle for each of the seven days of the week. In Untitled (Alicia, hello forever) the dates 2021-2022, 2023-2024 and so on become lacey bricks which, in turn, are stacked into transparent walls. The temporal architecture of love.

TREE BOLTED

IDENTITY WEDGED

IDENTITY CAST

AT BAY

In contrast to her abstract armatures, Sahar presents several pictorial works that sometimes verge on traditional landscape painting, with trees and clouds—even a horse and rider--and colors reminiscent of Hockney, Hodgkin, and Hartigan. They remind me of Duchamp’s encyclopedic Boite, souvenirs jam packed with sentiment and small enough to carry off in an emergency. And I love that they are made from Friskie’s boxes.

BORDER DISORDER

BOUNDARY DISORIENTAL

BODY BARK

ARMOR AMOUR

Sahar is not about to sum it all up. She joins fragments into contingent associations that are less like a resolution than a pause in an animated conversation. An American-style football meets a black and white keffieyeh in the company of a ring of metal fleurs de lis; a rickety TV tray floats above the word Orientalism; a collection of red belts loops in and out of a curvilinear ceramic maze. Couples talk like this, in layers.

PAWS 2

SCRATCH THE

POPPY 2

EXTRACT THE SAP

MILK BLACK

BLOCK CAPITALS

GIANT CLOCK

PING TOCK

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