Exhibition: 88 Vessels
88 Vessels at Remote Gallery 2024
Location: Remote Gallery, Toronto, Canada
Date: October 24 - November 2, 2024
88 Vessels is a durational installation and performance exploring impermanence, intergenerational memory, and the ethics of artistic labor decoupled from commodification. Through the creation and disintegration of 88 hand-formed air-dry clay vessels—goblets, bowls, and dishes in varying sizes—the work articulates a relational, process-based practice rooted in ceremony, slowness, and resistance.
Formed through hours of repetitive, devotional labor, the vessels are raw, unglazed, and fragile, yet sovereign. They hold a mystic, maternal presence that transcends their material form. Their aesthetic intentionally resists polish and finality, embodying both the capacity to hold and to yield. The number 88 serves as a symbolic and energetic code, evoking continuity, multiplicity, and ancestral presence. Each vessel functions simultaneously as object and agent: not merely holding memory and energy, but enacting the maternal—transmitting, protecting, and ultimately releasing.
The performance component featured the ritual pouring of black ink-infused water—pigment sourced from the left-over rinse water from my ink paintings—into the vessels, allowing the liquid to flow, spill, and migrate between forms. This unscripted gesture became a visual metaphor for the porous movement of trauma, resilience, and embodied memory across generations. The ink, both material and metaphor, served as a conduit for unspoken histories and somatic knowledge.
Over the course of the exhibition, the vessels softened, cracked, and gradually collapsed, returning to their base material. This slow degradation was a deliberate conceptual choice—foregrounding impermanence and challenging dominant art world economies that prioritize permanence, ownership, and saleability. In this context, the work becomes an act of resistance: a refusal of objecthood and market logic, and a reclamation of process as value.
88 Vessels positions itself as a living altar—a site of quiet witnessing, emotional residue, and collective release. It invites viewers to reimagine the role of the artist not as a producer of objects, but as a facilitator of transformation. By privileging dissolution over preservation, the work interrogates the commodification of embodied memory and ancestral presence—questioning the ethics of extracting value from what was never meant to endure, but to be witnessed, held, and ultimately returned.
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