Viscera
ON VIEW March 25 – May 6, 2023
ARTIST RECEPTION:
SATURDAY, APRIL 22ND, 5–6:30 PM
The Soraya Art Gallery
California State University, Northridge
18111 Nordhoff Street
Northridge, CA 91330-8448
PARKING DETAILS »
PLAN YOUR VISIT HERE »
Presented by the California State University Northridge Art Galleries, Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to announce Viscera, a solo exhibition featuring the suspended aluminum sculptures of Los Angeles artist Fay Ray, on view at The Soraya Gallery from March 25 through May 6.
Linking weathered aluminum sheets with precious stones, wire, chain, and cast-aluminum objects into suspended sculptural masses, Fay Ray’s visual vocabulary explores her familial and religious roots relative to the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity. Viscera continues the artist’s exploration of sculpture that exists between the terrestrial and the intangible, endlessly shifting between specificity and mystery to channel the abundant potentialties carried within all beings.
Returning to the High Desert in Southern California where she grew up, Ray collects a variety of materials intimately linked to her past, giving equal attention to the industrial trucking equipment and metal scraps of her family’s multi-generational agricultural trade, the woven baskets and abalone displays found in the homes of her youth, and to the corn, cacti, agave, and seashells found naturally in the desert landscape. Representative of labor and harmony with nature, the artifacts are imbued with human touch, a specific location, and a certain passage of time, further expanding their presence beyond material properties. Cast in aluminum, Ray joins these amulets to sheet metal with individually-formed chain links, leveling the icons’ power through interchangeability, like charms on a bracelet. Conflating worlds of natural and spiritual worship, the works borrow their hand-fastened structure from the compositions of religious relics and the visual language of the occult. Shifting between specificity and mystery, Ray’s artworks embrace ambiguity as the realm of endless potential.
Fay Ray, Verdo (detail), 2023. Aluminum, stainless steel, onyx, cast-aluminum shell. 63 x 30 x 4 in.
In addition to the landscape’s relations to migration and labor, Ray also looks to desert materials for their symbolic potential relative to femininity, fertility, and motherhood, enlisting a mysterious yet systematic organization of abstract form to evoke a continually materializing body. The suspended and wall-mounted artworks resemble an oversized body adornment, such as a necklace, earring, or keychain, implying the invisible presence of a massive being to whom they may be offered. At the same time, Ray counters the large scale and visual weight of the metallic works with spaciousness and lightness. The razor-thin aluminum sheets hang on a single plane such that they respond to subtle shifts in the environment, drifting in and out of view relative to the viewer’s position, making them either voluminous or virtually invisible. By orchestrating the experience of the work between seen and unseen, she embraces the concept of expansion and contraction: indicating the potential for abundance in its apparent absence, her compositions invoke the cycle of all living things. Rooted in femininity, Ray’s practice draws out the parallel capacity to generate and sustain life in motherhood.
Employing icons from her youth, Ray thoughtfully utilizes form and materiality to represent the experiences of women and latinx communities without drawing on essentialist tropes. With the harmonic balance of nature throwing social inequities in sharp relief, Ray’s gestures toward the cycles of life and the occult pay homage to the natural world over the man-made and monumentalize the natural forces that constitute all beings.
The Soraya’s Art Gallery is located on the Loge Level of the Great Hall. Exhibitions are open to ticket holders one hour prior to Soraya-presented performances, during intermissions, and by appointment.
Exhibitions are funded in part by the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media and Communication, Instructionally related Activities Committee and The Soraya.
For more information or to make an appointment for viewing, please contact Crystal Diaz at 818-677-8821 or via email at crystal.diaz@csun.edu
. 
