You Are a Star in My Sky explores themes of global migration, ritual identity, and personal narrative in hopes of building a more inclusive world.
Tammie Rubin and Ryan Takaba begin this endeavor by engaging with rituals that set forth bigger intentions. Takaba channels the power of routine with an installation of live flowers housed in small porcelain vessels whose survival depends on mindful care. Without daily watering, these flowers fail to bloom. Rubin’s work draws attention to what happens when society fails to set positive intentions. Her work illustrates the vast, chaotic web of systemic discriminatory practices that affect Black Americans.
Arizona students Jorge Hernandez Chacon and Xitlalic Ortega Perez and Texas students Kim Le and Daniel Moncolva showcase ceramic works that share stories of resilience and cultural identity. Hernandez’s The Awakening depicts an internal shape erupting from a prison-like cage, which the artist likens to a metaphor for outsiders becoming their authentic selves in spite of social expectations. Perez’s work uses food scraps and seeds as vessels of hope for healing familial estrangement and allaying cultural expectations, recalling the bonding and cultural exchange that occurs during communal meals. Together, Hernandez and Perez’s works are united by a shared desire to thrive in a world that oppresses and controls with rigid value systems, be they apparent or overlooked, as in Kim Le’s Smile.
Le’s bright and colorful maximalist vessel Smile sarcastically comments on the misogyny embedded in unsolicited comments from men. The vacant smile depicted in Le’s sculpture betrays a thinly veiled desire to subvert gendered dynamics that stymie empathy and compassionate understanding. Like Le’s sculpture, Daniel Moncolva’s abstract, almost surrealist, vessels — such as Are You Straightedge? How Come You Don’t Drink? But You’re Mexican — confront overlooked relationship dynamics that carry social baggage, reminding us that social expectations can be universal or localized within a particular group, culture, or community. Together, Le and Moncolva’s work uses generational wit, humor, biting sarcasm, and astute social observations to illustrate the bizarre experience of inhabiting a binary world where truth is a singular, rather than a plural, phenomenon.
As a whole, this visually diverse, narrative-driven exhibition explores movement, whether in the small, intentional actions that underlie Takaba’s installation or in the decades-long movement of African Americans from the Southern states of America during the Great Migration that Rubin depicts.
—Jennifer Ling Datchuk
