Familial Technologies
at Commonwealth and Council

Familial Technologies (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artists and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles / Mexico City. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Next to the waxy gleam of hardwood flooring, the adobe path was dense with energy, almost alive, like an earthen tongue. Beginning at the gallery threshold, the path extended along one wall into the center of the room: To enter Familial Technologies, the recent group show at Commonwealth and Council, I had to cross it. I walked slowly, looking down. The bricks were uneven and irregularly sized, their rough, ochre surfaces flecked with mica and straw. Formed from Los Angeles mud by the artist rafa esparza and his collaborators, banqueta (2017/2024) combines the traditional techniques of adobe-making esparza learned from his father Ramón with minimalist sculptural intervention.¹ Such composite relationships between material, cultural, familial, and personal histories resonated throughout Familial Technologies. The exhibition’s artists explored inheritance not as a unidirectional transfer of knowledge, but as an ongoing reciprocal alchemy —an active, participatory process in which we reimagine and reconfigure the inherited knowledge and relationships that shape our present.

As I stepped off the pathway and walked through the exhibition, I was struck by the formal resonances connecting the works on display—not unlike resemblances between distant relatives. Familial Technologies’ artists engaged ancient materials and archives to refashion inheritances into something immediate and alive. Pencil drawings by Kang Seung Lee and Gala Porras-Kim played with traditional methods of recording and archiving information. Lee’s Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi, Cape Canaveral, Florida, 1985) (2021) is a drawing of a framed photograph. The original photograph’s subject is the deceased artist Tseng Kwong Chi, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1990.² In Lee’s drawing, Tseng’s body is replaced with a smoky smudge, departing from the realism of the source photograph and pointing to the more abstract experience of loss. The smudge denotes individual and communal grief, embodied in the marks made by Lee’s hand.

Porras-Kim’s luminous colored pencil drawing, San Vitale, Ravenna, marble floor reconstruction (2023) also plays with representation —the drawing carefully reproduces a patterned section of Italian marble flooring, textured with centuries of chips and scuffs. Here, the inevitable inconsistencies of Porras-Kim’s hand-rendering add to the floor’s real fissures and flaws, as if in a visual game of telephone. If inheritance entails slippage between then and now, there and here, Lee and Porras-Kim’s drawings speak to the generative potential in the gaps.

Some of the most arresting works in Familial Technologies were Lotus L. Kang’s sculptures. Mother (Spore, 2022–2023) evokes the process of food fermentation: Spread across the gallery floor as if in answer to esparza’s path, the work comprised a grouping of stainless steel bowls containing food items cast from aluminum—cabbage, kelp knots, dried pears—and other debris half-submerged in pink and amber pools of silicone. Here, the fizzy chemistry of fermentation, a staple of the traditional cuisine of Kang’s familial homeland, Korea, is suspended in deathless, inorganic substances whose tints and textures render the process strange and unfamiliar. Fermentation preserves food, and Kang’s sculpture preserves the practice—but not without literally and figuratively recasting it as something else. In this way, the sculpture points to the limitations and possibilities of sustaining traditions across great temporal, geographic, and psychic distances.

Similar themes suffuse Kang’s Mesoderm (Market) and Mesoderm (Holes) (both 2023), which hung on the wall adjacent to Mother. In each work, a tiny, gestural image of Seoul and New York³ is drawn in darkroom chemicals on photographic paper and layered atop a pinkish, pimpled silicone rectangle. Kang borrows images from personal and historical photographs that span her family’s diasporic history (her grandmother fled North Korea for Seoul, eventually moving to North America, while Kang lives in New York). Her drawings are loose impressions, evocations that, like Lee’s drawing of Tseng’s photograph, playfully subvert any claims photography might lay on authoritative representation. By layering these drawings on top of silicone squares that are at once flesh-like and jarringly artificial, Kang extends her exploration of the slippery relationships between the past, our representations of the past, and our embodied present.

In a far corner of the gallery, Cayetano Ferrer’s marble sculptures employed patching and fusing as a material means of exploring the interdependence of inheritance and creation. Quarry Composite (Wall Plate) (2014) loomed on the wall, a hard-edged rectangle of white-streaked serpentine green, smooth but for two irregular, darker green patches of stone in its center, outlined by jagged white seams as if the stone had torn and been repaired. The work combines marble with synthetic infill; I couldn’t tell which was which. “Real” marble is a metamorphic stone formed over centuries as limestone is exposed to high heat and pressure, creating its characteristic mottling. In Ferrer’s sculpture, as in Kang’s, this geology takes on a metaphorical aspect as organic materials and synthetic fabrications fold together, compress, and alloy, becoming mutually constitutive. Side by side, the marble and the infill activate—even co-create —each other (one is “real” because the other is fake, one ancient because the other is new). A productive tension gathers in the seams that join the two.

Each past implies a present, each entrance an exit. I returned to the adobe path. banqueta is a composite of many things: earth, straw, water, and sun; bricks and gaps; a family legacy; a collaborative labor; the first piece in the show and the last. The path orients us, forces us to adjust our balance; and as we move, we, in turn, add marks of our own. In Familial Technologies, the path is a two-way channel, a dialogue that invokes the past in the present and remakes it, making it new.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 37.