Sun-dried mud bricks, foods fermented for preservation, these are some resourceful Familial Technologies passed down through generations, a subject explored in the namesake group show featuring works by Cayetano Ferrer, Gala Porras-Kim, Kang Seung Lee, Lotus L. Kang, rafa esparza, and Rose Salane.

The exhibition borrows its title from Jennifer Moon’s 2018 show at the gallery, where the artist explored identities and emotions as technologies. Our senses of self and predilections—how we look at the world, how we process information (say, with annotations on Post-its)—are often learned from the family unit, the first community we belong to. Works in the exhibition reveal inherited wisdom, know-how, and technes, imbibed and mimicked like a language.

Perhaps significant, all artists are third culture kids, whose development was forged in the frisson of cultural and linguistic difference. They are interested in looking into the gaps, the margins; the loamy mud of lack, of precarity, of displacement becomes the ground for experimentation and ingenuity. Tracing ghosts of memories from personal and communal archives interconnected and splitting in rhizomatic ways, the artists in Familial Technologies unearth outcroppings of (hi)stories buried. The alchemy from the margins turning pungent shame and deracination into fortitude and care.

The lotus plant is a resilient creature of the mud, germinating horizontally in silty waters and projecting vertically towards sunlight and bloom. Lotus L. Kang, the artist, also revels in the mucky waters of entropy. She regards the body as web-like, permeable and labile, and imbues a similar logic in her studio processes. Mesoderm works combine flesh-hued silicone with drawings made on photographic paper with darkroom materials. Gestural strokes both trace and distort scenes from personal and historical photographs, and street views across New York and Seoul, becoming fleeting vestigial snapshots of histories embodied and inherited, over diasporic distances.

Mother (Spore, 2022-2023) spreads across the gallery floor. Kang views her proclivity towards the floor and the horizontal as both a formal means to betray linear narratives, as well as an inherited condition from her paternal grandmother who had a seed and grain shop in Seoul after fleeing North Korea. Stainless steel bowls, both ubiquitous in markets and specific in Korean households for kimchi production, hold aluminum casts of foods like cabbage, anchovies, and lotus tubers, steeping in viscous silicone. A constellation of memories pooled together, the vessels bear visceral residues redolent of, though pointedly unfaithful to, ideas of inheritance and motherland(s), suggesting a constant state of ferment, like our bodies, which through aging and decay become porous carriers of memory and time.

rafa esparza harnesses the Brown technology of mud. The artist grew up hearing stories about how his father had built the family home back in Durango, Mexico out of adobe. Following a fissure in the relationship caused by the artist’s queer proclivities, esparza asked his father to teach him how to make adobe. Adobe making is almost always a communal affair. The time spent together engaging in material conversation (if not so much verbal) mended the father and son’s relationship, forming a stronger bond embracing imperfection like kintsugi. The artist laid down the adobe bricks in banqueta at the entrances into the gallery, a sidewalk inviting us to step on and feel the sun-dried earth of Los Angeles on our feet. Over the course of the exhibition, our haptic encounters will leave their marks on the mud bricks—family tradition, indigenous technology, metonym for Brown bodies for the artist—perhaps even cracks that hold their own meaning and potential for restoration.

Cracks formed on a harder material occupy the interests of Cayetano Ferrer and Gala Porras-Kim. Marble is formed through metamorphism, Mother Nature’s alchemy producing the crystalline, porous rock, which have clad our architecture for millenia. In Quarry Composite works, Ferrer reconstructs marble fragments collected from various places, including casinos and hotels in Las Vegas, the hyperreal uncanny valley where the artist spent his adolescent years. The marmoreal rehabilitations reflect the artist’s longtime engagement with museum display architecture and restoration practices, and nod to a sensibility developed in youth as he observed how his father completed tile compositions. Incomplete shards are adjoined by infill fastidiously rendered digitally and printed on PVC, conflating the real and artificial. Patching the gaps and missing information, Ferrer negotiates a restoration of relations between disparate discarded fragments, reiterating the axiom that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Imperfections on marble—hairline cracks, mismatched colors—are faithfully drawn in Gala Porras-Kim’s San Vitale, Ravenna, marble floor reconstruction. The checkerboard pattern tells the Byzantine influence in the Italian city. More important to the artist are close readings of uncatalogued histories—of care and neglect, conservation and flawed restoration of the marble floor over the centuries of its life—divulged in colored pencil. Porras-Kim’s sharp eye was whetted during time spent with her historian father as a child visiting archives and museums. He would give her task games to play, to spot patterns and anomalies, to taxonomize and reorder. The artist applies the same mix of creativity and rigor now to various repositories of knowledge, not taking for granted that information presented by institutions of arts and sciences are always correct or fair, and posing questions about epistemological methodologies. The suite of drawings like One clump of feathers of in bag with Post-it index, in title and image, unidentified objects lying fallow in the Fowler Museum’s collection. Undefined and undeciphered, the objects have lost their cataloging number, stuck in a quasi-purgatory of the museum’s collection. Post-it notes at times accompany the recondite objects, guessing at their provenance or purpose. The annotations recall her father’s workspace and mode of thinking, illustrated by his computer screen wreathed in polychromatic Post-it notes.

Methodical research into unfrequented crevices of archives also impels the work of Rose Salane. The artist mines the evanescent, often mundane, imprints left on objects by everyday people. By agglomerating these objects, such as unclaimed rings in the lost and found office of New York City’s transit system or fragments taken from and returned to (often with contrite letters) the ruins in Pompeii, Salane locates poignant, intimate vestiges amidst the quotidian exchanges of contemporary urban life. Summer 2006, American Stock Exchange, 86 Trinity Place reproduces found maintenance records for the HVAC system at the financial securities marketplace. These prosaic vignettes silkscreened together gets abstracted into an elegant grid form from a distance, the beauty of analytical frameworks evoking the cryptic magical language of numbers and symbols the artist observed from her father’s work as a mathematician. Closer scrutiny of the piece reveals minute deviations from the rote logs betraying human wit. The ghosts of the invisibilized labor that allowed thousands to work at the now defunct financial halls of power.

Kang Seung Lee’s work bridge Familial Technologies with the show VISITOR-VISITEUR by Tseng Kwong Chi next door. A graphite drawing Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi, Cape Canaveral, Florida, 1985) depicts a photograph by the late artist Tseng, his own transient body rendered as a poof of smoke. The frame of the photograph is also drawn. On the white margin of the image reads a message, “Happy Birthday Keith,” a small clue to its provenance as a token of queer kinship between Tseng and Keith Haring. Inheritances from chosen families and fugitive spirits haunt Lee’s work, underscoring the power of communal care, even amidst the ravages of a deadly epidemic. Another work by Lee pays tribute to artists lost to AIDS, Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, and their relationship that was both artistic and romantic. A drawing of Hujar’s photograph, Paul Thek at the Palermo Catacombs (1963) with Thek’s body erased is accompanied by an embroidery sewn in 24k gold thread. It replicates a page from Thek’s journal, banners festooned on the page with the phrase “get over yourself” repeated five times like a mantra. Maybe Thek’s exhortation can be a familial technology too, to build a collective memory brick by brick, where we lie and become part of a fertile ground for the future, long after our discrete fragile bodies return to earth.

Cayetano Ferrer (b. 1981, Honolulu; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from University of Southern California (2010) and a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006). Solo exhibitions have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2019); Southard Reid, London (2018); Podium, Oslo (2018); Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires (2017); and Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2015). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Barbati Gallery, Venice (2023); Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2020); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2019); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson (2015); Swiss Institute, New York (2014); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Ferrer is a recipient of LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant (2015), Artadia Los Angeles Award (2013), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013).

Ferrer is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá; lives and works in Los Angeles and London) received an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (2012), an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2009), and BA from University of California, Los Angeles (2007). Solo exhibitions have been held at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2024); Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont (2024); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2023); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2023); Fowler Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla (2023); Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2023); Gasworks, London (2022); Amant, Brooklyn (2022); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Liverpool Biennial (2023); 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021); 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021, 2017); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2021, 2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019, 2016); PinchukArtCentre, Kiev (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019, 2017); Para Site, Hong Kong (2019); and Seoul Museum of Art (2017). Porras-Kim is a recipient of Gold Prize (2023), Art Matters Foundation Grant (2019), Artadia Los Angeles Award (2017), Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2016), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2015), Creative Capital Grant for Visual Artists (2015), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013). Porras-Kim has participated in residencies at Getty Research Institute (2021-22); Delfina Foundation, London (2021); Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge (2020); La Tallera, Proyecto Siqueiros, Cuernavaca (2019); Fundación Casa Wabi, Oaxaca (2016); and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2010).

Porras-Kim’s work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Fonds régional d'art contemporain des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; University of Richmond Museums; and Seoul Museum of Art.

Kang Seung Lee (b. 1978, Seoul; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2015). Solo exhibitions have been held at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2023); Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park (2023); Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2021); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021, 2017, 2016); Hapjungjigu, Seoul (2019); One and J. Gallery, Seoul (2018); and Artpace San Antonio (2017). Selected group exhibitions have been held at 60th Venice Biennale (forthcoming); documenta 15, Kassel (2022); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2022); New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); 13th Gwangju Biennial (2021); MASS MoCA, North Adams (2021); Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2020); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2020); Daelim Museum, Seoul (2020); and LAXART (2017). Lee is a recipient of Angeles Art Fund Artadia Award (2023), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2019), and Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2018). Lee has participated in residencies at MacDowell (2022); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2020); Artpace San Antonio (2017); and Pitzer College, Claremont (2015).

Lee’s work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence.

Lotus L. Kang (b. 1985, Toronto; lives and works in Brooklyn) received an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts (2018) and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal (2008). Solo exhibitions have been held at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2023); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2023); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2023); and Franz Kaka, Toronto (2020). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Whitney Museum of American Art (2024); SculptureCenter, Queens (2023); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale on Hudson (2023); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2023); and New Museum, New York (2021). Kang has participated in residencies at Triangle Arts Association, New York (2022); Horizon Art Foundation, Los Angeles, (2022); Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta (2020); and Rupert Residency, Vilnius (2018).

Kang’s work is in the collections of Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Kadist Art Foundation; Rivoli Due Fondazione per l'Arte Contemporanea, Milan; and Wrocław Contemporary Museum.

rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) received a BA from University of California, Los Angeles (2011). Solo exhibitions have been held at Artists Space, New York (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021); MASS MoCA, North Adams (2019); ArtPace, San Antonio (2018); and Ballroom Marfa (2017). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2023); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Mexico City (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (2022); Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston (2020); San Diego Art Institute (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016). esparza is a recipient of Pérez Prize (2022), Latinx Artist Fellowship (2021), Lucas Artist Fellowship (2020), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), Art Matters Foundation Grant (2014), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2014). esparza has participated in residencies at Artpace San Antonio (2018) and Wanlass Artist in Residence, OXY ARTS, Los Angeles (2016).

esparza’s work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kadist Art Foundation; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park.

Rose Salane (b. 1992, Queens; lives and works in New York) received an MA in Urban Planning from Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, City University of New York (2019) and a BFA from Cooper Union (2014). Solo exhibitions have been held at Carlos/Ishikawa, London (2023, 2018); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson (2021); and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2019). Selected group exhibitions have been held at MASS MoCA, North Adams (2023); French Academy in Rome (2023); Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2023); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2022); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); and New Museum, New York (2021). Salane is a recipient of Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2022). Salane has participated in residencies at Villa Médicis, French Academy in Rome (2023); Yale University, New Haven (2023); and Archaeological Park of Pompeii (2022).

Salane’s work is in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.