Rhonda Saboff (Parker Pine)

Rhonda Saboff (Parker Pine) Describes herself as a ‘field artist’. She learned in the field, the field being the junkyard, where materials arrive already marked by use, damage and time. This exhibition brings together works made between 1987 and the present, tracing a practice that has remained committed to that way of learning and working. The work is receptive rather than planned. Forms emerge from the material itself, a broken slat already a witch’s finger, a knot already a face, but also from the world pressing in: cultural figures, remembered images, the planes that pass overhead on their way to and from the Burbank airport. Growing up with a father who worked as a junk man, Rhonda developed an early sensitivity to what gets discarded and what remains. Scraps, leftovers and splinters are not secondary materials in this work, they are the foundation. Much of the wood used throughout the exhibition comes from demolished homes in Hollywood, collected over the past forty years. Some of these structures were lost to fire, others to redevelopment. In some cases, the materials come from houses the artist herself once lived in. These histories remain embedded in the surfaces and structures of the work, not as narrative, but as residue. My mother always jokes that it took “a village (people)” to raise me. Two of those village people were my godmothers, Gai and Rhonda. Together for 52 years, they formed an environment that shaped my early understanding of what it means to make something from what is already there. After Gai passed away unexpectedly in March 2025, I asked Rhonda if she would consider doing a solo show of her work. An idea I’d had for a while, but one that presented itself as a way to propel grief into another layer. For Gai —Sula Bermudez-Silverman

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