To look at the sea is to become what one is

To look at the sea is to become what one is
Manal Abu-Shaheen & Oscar René Cornejo
Curated by Laura August
Opening September 20, 2019
Radiator Gallery, 10-61 Jackson Ave., LIC, New York

Funneled by the persistence
of waves, the sea recoils
just to the line of the horizon 

The heart establishes its equations
while history rules itself
in the next room

--Etel Adnan, from “The Sky that Isn’t”

Pairing photographs by Manal Abu-Shaheen and sculptures by Oscar René Cornejo, To look at the sea is to become what one is considers ways of understanding place, somewhere between vision and memory, emotion and history, self-making and post-war forgetting. Together, Abu-Shaheen and Cornejo consider how we describe places that are impossible to return to–at least in the ways we remember them–despite their central importance in our emotional and intellectual lives. For both Abu-Shaheen and Cornejo, landscape and its materiality become a way of understanding what it means to be a post-war subject, or to come from a family fleeing conflict: both artists’ practices consider what we know about a place, a landscape, and its fluidity over time. Titled in homage to poet Etel Adnan, the exhibition finds the ghosts of the past in our intimate connections to the landscapes around us. These phantoms wander sites of ruin and reconstruction, touching the edges of how we understand ourselves, far from home and up against the constant movement of histories.

Cornejo’s sculptures, made at the scale of the human heart, continue his longstanding interest in the materials of construction as metaphors for displacement and resilience. He works with paired objects made of cotton, fresco, wood, handmade paper, and woodblock prints. Many of the objects hold plants and flowers; they are made at the scale of the things we can carry with us in crisis, and they enact the enigmatic healing force of portable, personal altars. Abu-Shaheen’s photographs follow the lives of her brother and his children at their farm in rural Pennsylvania. As structures crumble and are rebuilt, the children make worlds for themselves in costumes, collections of objects, and outdoor play. In their intimacy over a span of many years, the photographs allow the brave embrace of one American dream to abut the insistent difficulty of building a life far from home. Seen together, the works connect in their deep relationships to color and material, to scale and the quotidian. But they also remind us of the journeys so many of our elders have taken, so many of our beloveds still take. To be “in the heart of the heart of another country,” as Adnan writes, is to understand the depths of loss, to experience linguistic and cultural separations impossible to describe, and yet, still, to stitch together a life of both or many places. To look at the sea is to study one’s vulnerability, to embrace endless movement, to feel distance, and yet, still, to find the center of the self, even in the heart of constant change.

Manal Abu-Shaheen (b. 1982, Beirut) is a Lebanese-American photographer currently living and working in Queens, NY. Her recent solo exhibitions include Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, NJ (2018), Beta World City, LORD LUDD, Philadelphia, PA (2017) and Familiar Stranger, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea (2017); Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2016); The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO (2016); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2015); The Print Shop at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2014); and Camera Club of New York, NY (2013). She is a recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant (2017), Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant (2017), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency (2016), A.I.R Gallery Fellowship (2016), and Artist in the Marketplace Residency at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2015). Abu-Shaheen holds a B.A from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.F.A in Photography from Yale School of Art. She teaches at The City College of New York.

Oscar René Cornejo (b. 1982, Houston, TX) earned an MFA from Yale School of Art (2011), a BFA from the Cooper Union (2005), and was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in El Salvador. In 2004, he cofounded the Latin American Community Art Project (LA CAPacidad), where for seven years he directed summer artist residencies to promote intercultural awareness through community art education. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including White Flag, at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (2017), Collective Solid, Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, TX (2015); and Parliament of Owls, Diverseworks, Houston, TX (2015). Cornejo has completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he has been a member of the staff since 2015, and at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2016.