Martin Wong Gallery San Francisco 2025

My research investigates the relationships between industrial systems, domestic environments, and the body through sculptural experimentation with steel, aluminum, latex, and ceramics. I examine how everyday objects function as cultural artifacts shaped by systems of labor, power, and consumer expectation. Through material intervention, I explore the tensions between function and non-function, questioning how utilitarian forms regulate behavior and encode social values.
At the center of my research is the transformation of familiar domestic and industrial structures, furniture, tools, and appliances into these objects that hover between utility and abstraction. Industrial metals evoke architectures of stability, labor, and control, while latex and ceramics introduce fragility, memory, and bodily reference. Together, these materials construct a framework in which strength and vulnerability, reliability and failure, coexist. These material relationships offer a methodology for understanding the socio-political pressures embedded in the environments we inhabit. My background in anthropology shapes my approach to material as evidence of cultural systems.
I treat material behavior such as imprinting, collapsing, sagging, resisting as a form of knowledge production that reveals how designed objects shape identity, movement, and social expectation. Latex functions as a surface of memory, capturing the traces of touch and pressure; ceramics embody the tension between domestic utility and structural fragility; metals reveal both the authority and the limitations of engineered function. Through these investigations, I highlight how the built environment mediates experiences of care, control, and belonging.
My recent work explores material function through domestic objects such as furniture, using latex, metal, and ceramic to test the limits of use, weight, and pressure. I’m interested in what happens when an object’s structure collapses under the weight of its own design. When the functional becomes emotional, unstable, or absurd. These moments of breakdown reveal the material’s agency and the space between control and surrender, a kind of limbo where function and meaning blur.
In Frank’s Chair, a suspended latex form stretched over a metal frame, the familiar shape of an office chair becomes unsettling. The flesh-colored surface sags and recoils, refusing ergonomic perfection and transforming a utilitarian object into an emotional one. It doesn’t function to sit; it functions to remember, to hold movement, and memory. Inspired by Jane Bennett’s concept of “thing-power” (Vibrant Matter, 2010), the work treats material as active, alive, and capable of resistance. Where Frank's Chair embodies collapse and memory,
“ Dog” made of steel captures this balance and tension. Made from plasma-cut steel, the sharp, uninviting table stands on its toes, poised between fragility and motion. This animal-like stance mirrors domestic and social structures that value endurance while concealing vulnerability. My object stool in porcelain called “ A place for cunts” plays within the stereotype that women should never sit down, while being made of porcelain broken down with one one leg left. Laying on its side unable to perform. These vulnerabilities the materials can offer me are crucial. I am drawing on Donna Haraway’s call to “make kin” with the nonhuman (Staying with the Trouble, 2016), I see materials as collaborators rather than tools. Entities with their own desires and limits. In this the porcelain allowed for a fragile bone to collapse.
Latex introduces softness into the industrial space of metalwork, producing a dialogue of opposites: flexibility and rigidity, care and resistance. This breakdown of material becomes a metaphor for the contradictions of care itself, the physical labor of maintenance, the quiet persistence of holding things together. By allowing latex, ceramic and steel to push back, my work embraces failure as a kind of truth-telling. Function is allowed to falter, exposing something deeply human beneath the surface.
As a French and first-generation American artist, my research is also informed by themes of displacement, negotiation, and hybridity. Several works engage changeability, imbalance, or incomplete structure, reflecting the fluidity of cultural identity and the instability of assumed function. By destabilizing familiar forms, my practice challenges conventional understandings of design and utility, foregrounding the ways objects participate in shaping social behavior and constructing lived space.
Ultimately, my research aims to reimagine domestic and industrial forms not as neutral tools but as active sites where personal history, institutional forces, and material agency intersect. Through sculpture, I make visible the systems that shape both objects and bodies, offering new ways to understand the relationships between materiality, power, and everyday life.