Curated by Maria Maea

February 2nd - march 2nd , 2019

I still wake the same
Coughing water from my lungs
My floating island suspended in a dream
I look into the folds of her face
My mind searches her milky eyes for the path back
Feet and hands repeating her gestures
Unconsciously swimming forward
My memory too foggy to know if I ever knew at all

Deep Waters is group exhibition exploring the here and now as liminal space. Situated between the wounded histories of our ancestors and a collective memory of a future shaped by our hand. Works included in the exhibition by JEM, Andre Keichian, Karla Ekatherine Canseco, Savannah Wood, Ellie Lee, Noe Olivas and Maria Maea.

Installation Images

Installation Images by Savannah Wood

About the Curator

Maria Maea

Maria Maea is a multidisciplinary artist working in production, installation and performance. Through film, sculpture and movement she deepens her connection to source.

Maria was also a contributing artist to this exhibition.

About the Artists

JEM

JEM is a writer and creator based in East Los Angeles. As an educator in the South Bay, JEM focuses on rhetoric and critical pedagogy. Working with ceramics, JEM explores portals and play through a rhetoric of totem and vessel storytelling. The porcelain collective installation, Whirling Cycles, unravels the spiral and its multiple ancient and contemporary motif meanings. Tracing the beauty and violence of undoing/coming together through multiple spatial currents, these spirals aim to articulate the current focus of JEM’s work on re-imagining prehistorical and post-future systems.

ANDRE KEICHIAN

Andre Keichian’s practice draws on the materiality of image, movement and mass to explore the boundaries of presence and absence, realism and abstraction, proximity and distance, and tangible and the ephemeral. Always interwoven with their personal history as a queer, transgender Argentine-American, they are interested in making work that addresses the complexities and contingencies of what we call identity, as their own is difficult to define.

Keichian currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Karla Ekatherine Canseco

Karla Ekatherine Canseco (b. 1996) is a Latinx gay interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her practice explores the nuances of identity through different mediums, particularly clay and performance. She incorporates the body knowledge that she has inherited from her family as immigrant workers into her work and as an access point to interpreting power dynamics. She is interested in how the body carries information that has been passed down and is present in all movement; She is intrigued by the way the body collapses conceptions of time such as past and present. Karla finds parallels between clay and the body by the way in which they both hold memory/history through impression and in containing what is present in the atmosphere. Her interest in the body’s holding of knowledge is explored through making. Karla reinterprets her own history and translates it through sculptures by merging different symbols that represent her family’s immediate history but also its sociopolitical implications.

SAVANNAH WOOD

Savannah Wood is an artist with deep roots in Baltimore and Los Angeles. Wood works primarily in photography, text and installation to explore how spirituality, domesticity, and our relationships to place shape our identities. Major themes in her work include ancestral research, reframing land as a readable archive, and depicting humans as part of, rather than separate from, the natural world. Her projects reconnect people with the everyday beauty of our world and the histories that lie hidden below the surface.

As the Executive Director of Afro Charities, Wood is creating infrastructure to increase access to the nearly 130-year-old AFRO American Newspapers’ extensive archives. In this role, she has shepherded the organization through a period of historic growth, initiated new programming, and attracted support from national funders including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and #StartSmall, Jack Dorsey’s philanthropic initiative.

Wood is a graduate cum laude of the University of Southern California. She is a 2022 Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund fellow, 2022 Creative Capital finalist, and a 2019 - 2021 Robert W. Deutsch Foundation fellow. Like four generations of ancestors before her, she lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, sharing and preserving Black stories.

Ellie Lee

Ellie Lee is reimagining her role as an artist. She is the co-founder and director of Equitable Vitrines, a public art non-profit organization based in Los Angeles. She is also active within the Asian American community and sits on the board of the Korea Arts Foundation of America and is a founding steering committee member of a diasporic Korean organization called GYOPO.