Patel Brown Montreal
February 27 – April 12, 2025
Summoning the Ineffable
Braxton Garneau, Sukaina Kubba, Marigold Santos, Dominique Sirois, Sergio Suárez, Swapnaa Tamhane.
curated by Roxanne Arsenault and Devan Patel
In Summoning the Ineffable, we are presented with a polyphonic expression of the stories that materials contain. All mediums are perpetually in relation to histories of production, consumption, extraction, and creation. Here, the artists explore the affective dimensions of materials that have been passed through hands and across generations, a reminder that small gestures accumulate into expansive possibility.
Sukaina Kubba’s material and cultural research practices are inextricably enmeshed, like sand in the fibres of a fishing net, or crumbs in the weave of a dining room rug. This symbolic rug, as well as literal Persian ones, are frequently referenced across her practice. Through their patterns, rugs tell stories of travel and trade, and in their entirety they contain histories of production, acquisition, displacement, and display. By studying and repeating the lines and colours woven in each piece, Kubba can absorb the different range of information stemming from these heirlooms. Inextricable links amass into familiar figures, vertical landscapes replete with flora and fauna, or more abstracted homages to the sensation of embodied memory and the immaterial experiences that exist on the edge of articulation. Using 3D filament to recreate rugs and their internal pattern, Kubba’s works flow between drawing and sculpture, open-ended and enclosed, holed and delineated.
If human positionalities are the product of social and historical determinism, so are our human forms the consolidation of sweeping and varied material: data, anecdotes, plastics, grit, dust, beads, rain. Materials tell tellurian stories of attention to earthly cycles, the advent of polymers, cosmological origin, and the human phenomenological experience of navigating these elements.
- Emily Zuberec and Roxanne Arsenault
photos: John-Michael Seminaro
