Home of Earthly Delights

KUJA Collective’s first exhibition in collaboration with baby studio

15-20 June 

A multimedia, group exhibition to enjoy from the comfort of home (albeit ours, not yours). The works range from sculpture and painting to video and live performance, featuring work from the art collective baby studio as well as independent artists based in L.A, London and Chicago. 

From the first recorded instances of visual artwork–the cave paintings of Indonesia or France–art was created in and for the home. We ask ourselves, how is our understanding of a piece of art shaped by its location and our physical relation to it? In this debut exhibition, we hope to create a space that blends the intimate and the external. Each section of the exhibition relates to our interactions with people and nature and relates to the place it occupies physically, e.g. the bedroom or the living room.

THE LIVING ROOM

PORTRAITS

Stained glass is one of humanity’s most ancient art forms: from the hilt of a pharaoh's dagger to the great cathedrals of Europe and ancient, venerated mosques, stained glass has been used to honour and beautify those places where we encounter the divine. Some of the pieces include tongue-in-cheek nods to religious imagery while also celebrating the tradition of stained-glass portraiture. Using this hallowed medium for portraits and of friends and family is not just a subversion but instead reframes the home as a place of reverence too, with the object of this veneration being our loved ones.

ODES

Although odes are classically associated with music and poetry, the visual arts also strive to pay homage to the world around us. The sculptures use earthen tones and textures to celebrate the natural world. The artifice of the object honours the mud out of which it is fashioned. The paintings and photography, on the other hand, reflect man-made worlds. Where the watercolours offer expressionistic vistas of worlds we inhabit today, the photographs show an ancient venerated civilisation, now crumbling.

HOMEGOODS

Everyday objects that surround our lives are composed of an artistic value and utilitarian value. Artistic value arises from valuing the object for itself, while the utilitarian value arises from valuing it as a means towards an end. In the pre-industrial era, the distinction between the two was blurred, for every artisan would produce their goods for utility but imbue in their products an aesthetic that was unique to them. They had full responsibility for the nature of their product as a consequence of them owning their means of production. In our post-industrial era, workers are far removed from the production of the final good, playing but a miniscule and replaceable role in the complex web that constitutes the production process. Their natural creativity is suppressed by the repetitive nature of their work and overshadowed by the efficiency of the machine.

We are now seeing a resurgence of ceramics and carpentry in the art world. These pieces return to the artisanal mode of production. They prompt the viewer to ask themselves: when are your tables, your faucets, your lamps, or your iPhone considered works of art? Can we reclaim art for the workers, so that once more they may be called artisans?

Baithak: 15th of June at 7pm

This is a live performance from Tomal Hossain called a ‘Baithak’ or ‘Mehfil’. This is a ubiquitous performance form in South Asian culture across countries, regions and genres. It is an intimate performance in a home of poetry or singing or dance. Historically, mehfils took place in the homes of Muslim noblemen, they were the primary patrons of both the performance and plastic arts. However, in the modern day this has spread to the homes of regular people who champion the arts or are artists themselves. We felt this tradition was fitting with the idea of our home exhibition. Tomal will break out of the confines of the traditional baithak/mehfil by exploring religious chant, mystical songs protest and songs, etc. which would usually entail the street, festival, concert stage, mystic lodge/shrine, etc. to explore how spaces shape our experience of music: highlighting the meshing of the public and private spaces we have set up here.

THE BEDROOM

APPERCEPTION

The defining feature of the home: you. The bedroom is where you are continuously becoming yourself. This is a room for rest, rumination, reinvention: all forming invisible stitches in the fabric of time. From the most banal thoughts to fantastical dreams, our mind spends at least a third of its life in a bedroom, and often alone. The bedroom prompts the most apperception: the reflection and assimilation of the day into our sense of self, the crystallisation of events into memories, ideas—the personality.

The stark combination of red and blue in this room represents the extremes of emotion between which we vacillate. Where red can evoke the raw, bodily intensity, blue can take us to a more mystical or otherworldly place. The bedroom is often where these emotions find their unbridled release and are processed. The pieces here explore the breadth of our self-explorations: from corporeal, carnal experiences to spiritual ones, all of which can occur from the humble home.  

Please enjoy and relax here, you can stand, sit or lie down anywhere you like.

ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION

Talia Ceravolo (she/her) is a figurative oil painter based in Los Angeles, CA.  In 2022 she received her Masters in Painting at University of Miami, FL. She is currently teaching art at several universities in Los Angeles County including CSU Long Beach and CSU Fullerton. Her most recent series explores painting outside the confines of its rectangular frame. IG: @taliaceravolo

Rupam Baoni (she/her)  is a writer and artist based in London, whose work ranges from poetry, fiction and essays to watercolour, oils, acrylics and sculpture. Her most recent collection of poems chronicles of entering my body (Hypatia Publications 2021) received critical acclaim and won the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2023 finalist award. In her visual art, she is drawn to an expressionist, lyrically abstract mode of articulation. IG: @rupambaoni

Viridis Artem (she/he/they) is the representative name for Mary Wisdom, local self -taught artist. Mary’s love of everything green inspired the name. Her art is also heavily influenced by her love of nature and especially sunsets. She resides in Mission Viejo, California with her son where she has the privilege of being able to paint in oil and acrylic full time. IG: @viridisartem

Jamiee Zhuge (she/her) is an LA-based ceramicist and jewellery artist, mixing mediums and napping in a beautiful place between chaos and the mundane. For Jamiee, discovery is the practice. Her work traces lines between what is known and what is unsettling, what is human and what is not, what is modern and what is ancient, what is brutal and what is delicate, sensing the textures that fill a dissociative yet intimate relationship with a serendipitous cosmos.  IG: @tr4ashspider

Nick Kasunic (he/him)  is a stained glass maker, ceramicist and writer bouncing between California and Pennsylvania. Suspiciously self-indulgent and ascetic in his creations, he is committed to figuring out how the grotesque, the self-satirical, the cute and corny meet the sublime, the epiphanic and the quiet, teary-eyed realization of self and love. He loves a vessel that pours well and/or glugs, everyday use hand-bowls, and works that inspire a moment of bewildered stupor. 

IG: @jankbabyblue

Inessa Illes (she/they) is a visual artist practicing in textile, illustration, glass and digital works in Los Angeles. Inessa specializes in designs that prioritize bright patchworks and themes to evoke joy, nostalgia, and a return to childhood. Inspired by the freedom of DIY culture, experimental silhouettes, and the practice of self-adornment as a means of artistic expression, Inessa’s work is at the intersection of seriousness and playfulness. IG: @sixwun

The artist formerly known as Sam (she/he/they) is an outlaw. A multidisciplinary creator using the world as their canvas and exploring every medium under the sun. Her work is a tapestry of wonder and whimsy inspired by street art style, dadaism, and the creativity of the black diaspora. Her process is endlessly experimental, delving deep into the contours of the artist’s whirring, imaginative inner life. IG: @fkasam

Alanna You (she/her) Born in 1992 under the vibrant skies of Los Angeles, she is a Libra on an insatiable quest for beauty and balance in the rich visual tapestry of LA. She graduated in 2013 from the UC Riverside brimming with ideas and a passion for exploring the vast canvas of human expression. In 2019, her photography earned a feature in Rolling Stone, marking her ascent in contemporary photography. There are fine art prints available at @TheLostAngeleno, where each piece is a portal into the soul of Los Angeles, captured with unparalleled finesse.

Tomal Hossain (he/they) is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. His ongoing dissertation project concerns the music and song of Rohingya Muslim refugees in Bangladesh and questions of Islam and migration crisis in the Indian Ocean region/world more generally. Tomal has also worked on the songs of Kazi Nazrul Islam, (diasporic) Bangladeshi Muslim identity, and the sonic rituals of various, transnational Sufi orders. Alongside his studies, Tomal is a performer primarily of South Asian traditional musics including khayal, qawwali, and Nazrul sangeet while maintaining additional interests in Arab, jazz, and electronic music. Tomal is a co-director of the South Asian Music Ensemble at the University of Chicago, and he is a co-founder of the Chicago Mehfil, a collective and regular get-together of creators and lovers of the performing arts with a particular focus on the music of South Asia.