the space between (a promise)

Residency and exhibition, Oxbow Gallery, Seattle, WA, 2021

the space between (a promise) explores the concept that a utopic state is one of constant motion, constant striving, a continuous revolution towards something quite possibly unreachable.

Using Ursula K Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” as a starting point, Satpreet is thinking about utopia as a state between states - the moment of anticipation before an arrival, the dead space between songs on a much-loved record, the void between two objects - not the positive or negative, but the softer, invisible space between many things.

during this residency, i spent a month alone in oxbow’s generous gallery space, coming in almost everyday to sit and consider the space and the exhibition i would create. the first thing that struck me was the space’s expansiveness, and also its connection to the outside world, through the tall bank of windows that face south, and therefore caught most of the seattle sun as it moved through the sky on our long summer days.

it is in this space that i began to develop a method for creating my own substrate for painting - by taking used cardboard, a material that represents and encapsulates hyper global capitalism in our current age than any other, cutting it into smaller pieces, and stitching these pieces together with thread. thread has always been an important part of my practice, due to both its significance in my familial history (my maternal grandmother worked as a seamstress in a factory floor outside of Chicago, where she sewed uniforms for emergency personnel like firefighters and EMTs), cultural/craft history, and for the metaphor of a suture: the fact that it must puncture in order to mend.

after stitching these pieces of cardboard together, i coated them with a mixture of lime dust, gesso, and kenaf fiber. each of these materials invokes a history that i am trying to negotiate, incorporate, or subvert in my work.

lime dust (i am specifically interested in what can is classified as ‘poor lime’): is a material that has been used in building structures, shelters, and sculptures since at least the Great Pyramids. although it can be mixed with a mortar to create what is considered a ‘stronger’ bond in cement, lime on its own is both relatively structurally stable and able to shift and evolve - it requires care to maintain, but with the required maintenance comes a lack of permanency that is indicative of a pre-colonial mentality of impermanence and change. lime is a support without the hubris of cement. i like it for this reason.

gesso is a placeholder for me to reference the history of painting. at some point, i hope to make my own ‘gesso’ using chalk dust/egg shell, pigment, and animal glue, as painters did before the invention of modern gesso in the 1950s. until then, i use gesso to embed myself into the trajectory of contemporary painting. gesso on substrate = painting

kenaf fiber is a material that i am still exploring, both for its material and conceptual qualities. ultimately, kenaf has many uses. a cordage crop related to jute, it was imported and grown in mass quantities in the US due to its promise to create an eco-friendly and tree-less paper. for the typical reasons privileged under a capitalist ecosystem (shipping unprocessed kenaf to paper mills was too expensive), kenaf fell out of favor, and the fields that had been planted for the development of paper needed a different use. after research and testing, it was discovered that kenaf absorbs more carbon than almost any other plant known to western science. and its absorbancy does not stop at carbon. when shredded into pellets that resemble small woodchips, kenaf can absorb 20 times its own weight. given this fact, kenaf is now mainly purchased in bulk and stockpiled on-site at oil refineries. when a spill inevitably occurs, kenaf fiber is dumped onto the waste site to absorb the spill.

the idea of an indigenous body being sacrificed for the unavoidable toxic byproduct of an imperialist system (in this case: oil extraction) is a metaphor that, through the use of kenaf fiber on all of my substrates, is embedded into all of my work. just because kenaf can absorb toxins does not mean it should have to. what kind of alternative future can i imagine for the kenaf, and therefore for myself and my community?