EXHIBITIONS - Litanies, PALLAS, 2025
Litanies evokes recitative patterns, gestures, and materials running through the exhibition as it charts the exchange between the orthogonal and the organic, the edge and the expanse. Making across wood, metal, and glass, the work is based on orthogonal systems - a spatial grid that echoes the ordering impulses of Western logic and design. Rectilinear grids define the forms of chairs, tables, and cabinets, and the striated wooden molds from which soft, disorganized glass vessels fall. Through the grid, the is emergent organicism that allows for moments of chance. Chairs become a field for new operations: burnished patina, hand engraving; repetitive carvings. Cabinets are staging grounds for blown glass, cast metal, quilted wood, and mesh curtains, with cast-off fragments serving as pulls. The forms themselves begin to propagate, diverging into their own variations.
Images: Ulysses Ortega
These liminal qualities underscore a broader inquiry into the boundaries of material behavior and the poetics of structure under pressure. Objects are performative acts. They are resistances. The cup resists the liquid so we can drink. The chair resists the ground so we can sit. The table resists dispersal so we can gather. The cabinet resists disorder so we can organize. Shelter resists the elements so we can inhabit. Through this dialogue of order and organicism, of repetition and rupture, the work reflects how we construct, inhabit, and imagine space. It is a tincture of how systems drive toward entropy and wholeness. In this grammar, fissures are openings—moments where new lines of inquiry emerge, and form finds renewal in its undoing.