Commonwealth and Council presents The Screaming Cumulus, Anna Sew Hoy’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Sew Hoy’s distinct sculptures disassemble human architectures through experimented clay forms, reworked textiles, scrap metals, and found objects. Often stripping down walls or flesh, her work attends to both the scaffold and the bounded interior, what we contain as well as what we cannot. In these new works, Sew Hoy exerts further pressures of perception, language, and feeling onto the externalized body and psychic figurations of the self.

Double Chamber is a large sculpture of cartilaginous arches hand-built around repurposed metal grating, charred and degraded by firing. Variegated glazes of pelagic blue-green, black, and white drip up over a saturated peach while a wired mouse hangs down inside, shelled with broken sunglasses and mirror tiles of assorted sizing. The effect is of wreckage; there is the sense of having been submerged, scoured, then trawled to shore. The arch-work continues in It is so is it so, entwined with long cotton-sheathed tubes, to form a complex substructure glazed in bronze and algae green and secured with an assurance of pink suede bows. Cradle or pelvic girdle, it casts the negative space into a permanent record of volume, of capacity.

Two large wall-mounted ear forms, All Allow and OR, offer the orifice as entrance, as receiver. Both share the silhouette of the right ear, resisting the bilateral symmetry that would suggest a complete listener. Discrete words, selected from the artist’s notebooks of the last two years, repeat in ringing assonance along the concentric helices. For Sew Hoy, language becomes another physical material, emotional residue to impress into bricolage. Single-word directives (carry, feint) cycle back at various registers and exuberate as onomatopoeia (aahhh), caught in rumination. The conjunction ‘or,’ earworm of alternatives, resounds inside the canal of one ear. Here, the word as curio elides fixed meaning and wards off attunement. Intuition and response are waylaid; instinct and reaction more prime.

Cue the mouth, ramped up on self-excited exhortation. Cue the screaming cumulus, inflamed speech balloon. A series of mouth forms are each pulled into a smile or grimace. In Tacit, a miniature ear is pinned dead center, pink and lingual, playfully taunting the viewer with its uncanny juxtaposition. The coils, underscored in ochre, obsess the hard G. The word ‘grind’ shuffles between several permutations while guttural growls are released into references to riot grrrl and affectional bonds between women (GRRLL, GGRRRRL). There is taut, grin-and-bear-it assent (GRRIIIITT, grinnnnniing). As the title suggests, Discrete Signals is quieter. Only the ear features text; the mouth coils glisten with melted glass, viscous and gluey, reminiscent of saliva or discharge. In the larger The Screaming Cumulus, heavy ropes are sewn into various blues and patterned fabrics, including cut-up T-shirts from Eve Fowler’s appropriations of Gertrude Stein (also used in It is so is it so). Citric, granulated letters spell G-R-I-I-N-D across the parted opening, hanging from long weepy brass, twist, and ball chains embedded into paper pulp along with aluminum can pull tabs. Five mirror tiles are tacked down one of two I’s, the viewer granted narrowest admission inside of the letter as pronoun.

–Jae Yeun Choi

Anna Sew Hoy (b. 1976, Auckland; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from Bard College (2008) and a BFA from School of Visual Arts (1998). Sew Hoy is faculty at University of California, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2025); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2023); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2019, 2015); Campbell Hall Gallery, Studio City (2018); Koenig & Clinton, New York (2016); Aspen Art Museum (2015); San Jose Museum of Art (2011); Sikkema, Jenkins & Co., New York (2010); Renwick Gallery, New York (2008); and The Brick, Los Angeles(2008). Selected Group exhibitions have been held at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2024); Albertz Benda, Los Angeles (2023); Jason Jacques Gallery, New York (2023); American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2022); Galerie Marguo, Paris (2022); Moràn Moràn, Los Angeles (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2021); Sokyo Gallery, Kyoto (2021); Koenig & Clinton, New York (2019); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014). Sew Hoy is a recipient of Fellows of Contemporary Art Grant (2023), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2022), Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2021), Creative Capital Grant for Visual Artists  (2015), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013).

Sew Hoy’s work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.