Maya Kabat: Always Already Again

SLATE Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present new works by Maya Kabat in her solo exhibition, Always Already Again.

Artist Statement

This series of paintings titled Always Already Again investigates concepts of landscape from multiple, shifting vantage points. In these works, “Landscape” is a process; it is comprised of ever-shifting forces of geology, biology, deep time, memory, history and myth. Like the landscapes we occupy, these works are not static but are containers for this multiplicity of overlapping perspectives and understandings. 

Stretching across the painted surfaces like towers, puzzles, maps, rivers or spines, my compositions play with notions of chaos and order, balance and imbalance in an effort to hold multiple realities at once. These works rest in tension and seek to create language for the environmental uncertainty and precariousness we face, without crumbling beneath the weight of the understanding. 

In addition, I create paintings that emphasize the physicality of embodied experience. In response to our cultural obsession with the digital, the textural and sculptural nature of these works emphasize the haptic and the sense of touch. Despite our efforts to live through our screens, we can’t escape our bodies and the sensual, textural world in which we live. While many of us exist in disconnection from embodied experience, it is our visceral relationship to the world we inhabit and our sense of touch that helps us locate our bodies in space and, I argue, contributes to a deeper relationship to the places where we live. By developing paint surfaces that are thick and dense with slabs, ridges and peaks these works provide a place for the body to experience its own materiality and invite a deeper connection to the physical world around us.  

– Maya Kabat

For this exhibition, we are hosting a fundraiser for Sogorea Te Land Trust, an urban indiginous women-led land trust based in the San Francisco Bay Area that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to indigenous people. This fundraiser includes a donation of 20 percent of all sales to the organization. Please consider finding out more about paying land tax and donating today. Learn more at www.sogoreate-landtrust.org.