Exhibition Essay
Dr. jill moniz
EXHIBITION ESSAY
SHENG LOR: INTERSTITIAL
Jill Moniz, PhD
Interstitial best describes Sheng Lor’s art practice as the register of her cultural life. She occupies several overlapping states of fugitivity, and it is in these liminal spaces that she creates her woven looms and thread drawings to continue to evade capture.
I met Lor in the transience of the UCLA MFA program and it was there that as an adjunct professor, I watched her confront the many temporally loose constructs around her born from a history of loss but also art’s transformative power of recovery and care. During this impermanence, Lor gathered these attributes of spiritual and material knowledge to build her practice where ritual and innovation coalesced into praxis. There, the first loom was assembled and woven, a departure from and homage to Lor’s past and a corroboration of her Hmong understanding of the world realized through the investigation of the intangible yet vital spaces existing between the loom and its shroud. Post graduation, Lor has sought to reimagine weaving as fugitive making, disrupting the confines of the loom where colors – representing spirits in Hmong culture – can form new relations on paper, boundless and free that feel larger than they appear.
Hmong rituals are central to Lor’s identity as a weaver, and she draws on the tenets of those traditions to construct and maintain radical sites that obscure yet shelter the borderlands where belief manifests through making. Felt in the fullness of the yarn woven looms that at once emanate delicate materiality and sublime density, the secret transcendental power of the womb and the tomb revealed and hidden from the eye, demanding to be sensed through an emergent composition. Ethereal thread drawings created from colors that represent Hmong guardians of all worlds – rich, warm iridescences that leave a lingering ghost image in the occipital lobe as memory and spiritual blessing of connection that cannot be broken. These moments exceed experiences with wood, color, paper, transmogrifying objecthood to reflect and hold the conjuncture of spirituality and visuality that eclipse the didactic. Lor offers them to embody life's record and our ability to sense and know ourselves through ritual and practice.
Patterns emerge from Lor’s engagement with material, patterns that exalt the ancestors and camouflage positionality. Through these interstitial apertures and oculi, intention is fortified and elided, removing all but one path forward. Metaphorically invoking a tenet of Hmong belief, that all things have a spirit, the works are alive and activated by human interaction, a call to devotion and the response as energetic exchange resonating between each object where the viewer becomes the interstices of the whole. The fugitivity of this relation lies in the exhibition’s design and presentation as an altar, as a cardinal direction and a labyrinth, a traditional Hmong symbol, evidence of ancestral protection through devotion to earthly material understanding. The looms positioned in the center surrounded by large drawings hung around the gallery as spirit sentinels reverberating power through subtle gestures of Lor’s mark making, her invitation into an essential, resilient geography.
Viewers encounter that strength in the sureness of Lor’s material choices. The limited quantity may seem incongruent to the conceptual depth of the making, however this discordance is subsumed by a harmonic connectivity that signifies Lor’s fugitive intentions in spaces disguised as emptiness but holding the cosmic and the earthly, where the spirits address futility and grief, longing and desire to ensure the wellbeing of the maker and her kin. The only guide star she gives us is the pedestals that signal that these objects are sacred, to encounter them is to be in communion with the divine. In this immaterial yet tangible geography, answers are found in the interstitial.
Neurons in the brain rhythmically pulsate fluid through their interstices during sleep to wash themselves clean. Viewers will experience a similar sensation moving through and around Lor’s works. There is a kinetic energy to both the looms and the drawings that makes the body rock as it instinctually tries to center itself, however, Lor revels in the beauty of evading capture as the refusal to give away such power. Instead, she makes works that insists on challenging any outside systems or priorities where what washes through the material is the space where her guardians remain to keep her free.
–jill moniz, PhD
Founder, Transformative Arts
