Wet

Parker Gallery is proud to present Wet, its first solo exhibition with Sahar Khoury. Sculptor Sahar Khoury explores the interdependence of materials and their social and cultural environments. Frequently bringing together unlikely objects, she utilizes strategies of assemblage and an ethos of multiplicity. This new body of work, presented here for the first time, is the result of two three-month-long residencies in 2024 and 2025 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin where Khoury had access to an industrial-scale metal Foundry and ceramics Pottery. While making molds and casting have always been prominent features of Khoury’s practice, they are the central processes evident in these ceramic, steel, iron, brass, and aluminum sculptures, made with the aid of technical factory technologies. Finding that she needed an immense amount of force to execute the sand molds used in metal casting, Khoury joined a gym for the first time in her life where she began swimming and taking strength training classes. The YMCA as a site for collectivity, equity, and literal body sculpting inspired most of the forms in Wet. Khoury found that, in the space of the gym and its pool, resistance, tension, propulsion, balance, density, and buoyancy are achieved with the aid of objects such as kickboards, swim weights, pull buoys, and barbells. These items became the models for Khoury’s casts. Other nautical accoutrement—including mooring buoys, propellers, duck decoys, and rope—also appear throughout the installation. In the work Untitled (Bodies of Water), Khoury constructs a base of interlocking blue ceramic tiles on top of which float several casts of duck decoys (some of which absurdly function as candlestick holders), ceramic kickboards, and a replica of choereg, a traditional Armenian bread that happens to resemble a flotation device. The sculptures Backstroke 1 and Backstroke 2 are constructed from molds of actual boat propellers cast in porcelain. The stacked propellers of Backstroke 1 resemble vertebrae as they slowly spin at 1 RPM, executing one full rotation per minute. Like a body treading water, they expend energy while remaining stationary. While researching gym equipment, Khoury learned that children’s play structures are often built using the principles of the geodesic dome in order to withstand large amounts of weight and tension. Seeking out examples on Craigslist, she sourced two steel domes, constructed with Buckminster Fuller’s principle of “tensegrity,” using latticed tetrahedrons (a polyhedron with four triangular faces) to construct extremely light but extremely strong structures—most famously in his geodesic domes. Khoury turns the two nestled domes into a giant candelabra with cast candlesticks that function as bolts. In invoking Fuller’s dome, Khoury also considers Fuller’s late 1960s theory of the “Spaceship Earth,” a concept of our planet as a shared home with finite resources in which survival depends on cooperation. Fuller wrote, "selfishness is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.” The strongest structures—including Khoury’s deadpan assortments of objects—involve the collaboration of interlocking parts. Sahar Khoury (b. 1973 in Chicago, IL, lives and works in Oakland, CA) received her BA in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996 and her MFA From UC Berkeley in 2013. Select solo exhibitions include Umm, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2023); You can't cut it up into pieces, CANADA, New York, NY (2022); Orchard, Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco, CA (2022); and 2019 SECA Art Award, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2019). Select group exhibitions include Rhythmic Vibrations, American Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennial, curated by Abby Chen and Naz Cuguolu, Gwangju, Korea (2024); Triennial Exhibition, Bay Area Now 8, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2018); Artwork for Bedrooms, CCA The Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA (2018); Her work is included in the collections of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), San Francisco, CA; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin OH. Khoury's work is currently on view in the group exhibition Rave Into the Future: Art in Motion at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA (2025-2026). Khoury's first West Coast solo museum exhibition and largest exhibition to date, Sahar Khoury: Weights and Measures, will open at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, CA in January 2026.