The house is on fire.

tabernacle explores mobility, impermanence and collective action in a time of instability. Drawing from wandering domiciles, roaming connections, or places of worship which are adaptable, portable, and responsive to their environment, the included artists, Boz Deseo Garden, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), Andre Keichian and Miller Robinson, are each journey-based, nomadic makers of communal, public ceremonies, and contemplative, solitary rituals.

Like the turtle who carries her home on her own back, this is an unstable exhibition, offering a durational architecture through photography, sculpture, text and performance. tabernacle is as much about interiority as housing, inviting reconsideration of the structures which bind us, how we hold space for others, and the malleability of ideological and material containers.

Words and curation by Matthew Lax


deviations of a scattered line
4x5 glass photographic plate fused with sand from the Pacific shoreline, palm wood, sand, chalk line, wall etching

excavation sight
wall etching, chalk 





















Salt in the I is an ongoing project of site-responsive photographs and objects composed for framing, viewing, and place-setting.

This project processes the artist’s family’s history of displacement and diaspora through elementa changes that occur when salt, water, and wood frame a past that remains ungraspable. This installation’s ethos came from a recently encountered family photo album, whose migratory mapping traverses across the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Armenia), to France, Argentina, and the United States. Keichian’ Armenian born and, later, Argentine citizen grandfather photographed all the source materials for this work. Although they never met, this speculative collaboration draws a warped line between two peopl separated by time, land and sea. The work speaks of presence and absence through an exchange of both tangible and ephemeral temporalities, which move through distance and time. Keichian explores speculative interpretations of what an archive can do, rather than limiting memory to representatio defined by familial trauma. This exhibition plays with many unknowns that cling to the artist’s genealogy, giving a bent look through salt in their eye as they try to traverse oceans of time. This work is a speculative dip into the negatives that make up Keichian’s family’s history, looking askew to find queer stances and lost topographies.

This work has been shown in multiple iterations.

Below:
Table Gallery, Chicago, IL, 2019 Images: Kim Becker

Below:
Tactics of Erasure and Rewriting Histories, installation view, 2022. Courtesy of Craft Contemporary 
Photos: Josh Schaedel






Below:
ReflectSpace, 2023, Glendale Central Library, Glendale, CA









Backstrokes: movements across name, place and time 

Edward Said wrote about the contrapuntal as a palimpsest of two things at once; the exile who embodies a plurality of place. Similarly, I exist within  a multiplicity of borders, though now I refer to my own gender. I use Said’s image of the exile as a way to frame my trans identity within the larger diasporic narrative of my family.

This took form in my installation where I cast the backs of friends who have a relationship to migration - either by may of immigration or through gender expression. I then abstracted their body molds using sand and cast them in concrete.  The outcomes are sculptural body casts that display a map of displacement across the concrete gallery floor, each back resisting, making their own wave in a sea of many.

These sculptures were accompanied by a mural print of my grandfather swimming, possibly the Atlantic, possibly the Mediterranean, probably the 1930s. immersed within a sea of no borders, a floating head, a body implied. a disembodiment of possibility. (mural sized, hung low so the bottom of the sea bends onto the floor)







i. name
I changed my name twelve years ago this March. I adopted my father’s name, Andres, which was also my grandfather’s name, except my grandfather used an accent so it was written as Andrés, then I removed the “s”. My birth name began with an “S” and I felt I had had enough of that and with it’s removal, it positioned me in-between the male Andrés, or Andres, and the female Andrea, a name that, to me, signifies constant becoming.

2 letters from my father (handwritten and typed, otherwise identical, to be hung on wall):

My great grandfather's first name was Antranik that sounds and probably is Andres in Spanish. His son, my grandfather, was therefore also named Antranik although because of social decor in Argentina was Andres from the beginning. And I was also named Andres but also had a middle name, Hugo and was never known as Andres but Hugo. I came back after I emigrated to the US where to my chagrin I was also known as Andy.
But the worst offense against our identity was the so called abbreviation of the last name of the entire family by the surprised custom agents who greeted them upon their arrival to their new country, from Kachichian to Keichian easier to
pronounce in a language with an entire different alphabet than the Armenian.

You were baptized, and I must clarify that we did not suffer from religious confusion because we all are Catholic whatever it means, as Stephanie Joan Keichian. I do not know if you thought Joan was for the crucified Joan of Arc but for a strange reason you adopted the French name Andre that means Andres in
Spanish and probably Antranik in Armenian. It was probably an ancestral impulse to reach my ancestors in an elegant way although it is true that my grandfather was educated in a French School although it was in Lebanon that at that tim was controlled by France.

ii. place
a photograph of my grandfather swimming, possibly the Atlantic, possibly the Mediterranean, probably the 1930s. immersed within a sea of no borders, a floatin head, a body implied. a disembodiment of possibility. (mural sized, hung low so the bottom of the sea bends onto the floor)

Going to America at that time was a source of hope, you know. You don’t know what they knew, they knew some letters of some people who came and I don’t know how those letters would end up at that time came from South America to Middle East. It may take months probably to get there on ship and then, that was
something. That was the history of immigrants of that time. There were ships, there were nothing else. It was like going to the unknown and knowing sometimes that it was forever probably because you wouldn’t go back, no chance. They never went back, they never had a chance to go back they were working hard and going back, when you take a trip like that you don’t know if you’re going to survive or what. I know my grandmother, there was an epidemic on the ship, yellow fever or something like that, and they wouldn’t allow the ship to get into the port of Brazil in Rio because of the illness and they used to throw the bodies to the sea, the dead bodies. And you wonder how they survived, those who survived. We don’t know why we are here, we could have been nonexistent or whatever.

iii. time
castings of backs, a living archive of kinship, rendered in fine concrete (placed throughout the space, emerging from concrete floor, direct lighting)

a letter to my collaborators:

this is not a single body but many bodies.
they do not offer an unveiling of anatomy; instead they make visible their own hiding.
they are genderless, they have no color, no classification.
they speak to difference without differentiating.
hard and heavy, lying down like animals, they carry their own weight.
backs are illegal, backs migrate. their curves like waves, they move.
debris, dust, fragmentation.
they are strong, they work, they become sore, they sometimes break, these backs are precarious, these backs are cared for.



¡que rico! i just need you in the reel (2014) investigates my family’s displacements by tracing the relationships between absence and presence through morphing the digital, virtual realm into a more material experience by constructing physical elements that house the virtual via installation.




This temporary, site-responsive work, which resists institutionalization through its temporality, took form through the building of a darkroom; hand-painting the museum wall with light sensitive silver-gelatin emulsion, where I again exposed and developed the coated surfaces. The video source footage depicts myself eating ice-cream with a life-sized cut out of my recently deceased grandmother, in which I repeat the phrase ¡que rico!.

Mounted beneath the painted photograph rests a wooden mantel displaying a collection of offerings from chosen family, blending the virtual with the tangible, and biological with non-biological kinship. Though the work is difficult to read, a history hinting to my process remained marked on the wall. The objects resting on the mantel blocked light during the exposure and marked shadows on the wall; remnants of discolored photo chemicals dripped down the surface of wall; and beneath the piece are boxes displaying my test exposures. The struggle that is a part of both the creation and the reading of these images are, in part, the performance of its meaning.









Auto-Pecho i & ii (2013)
handpainted silver gelatin emsultion, digital video



Auto-Pecho i & ii (2013)

The process:

Here I painted silver-gelatin emulsion onto paper. I digitally recorded, then projected two videos of myself onto the silver gelatin: one video where I stand still and clothed, and another where I am unclothed and gestating my chest.

This bodily movement, when projected onto a surface designed to capture stillness, resists staticity and presents a blurred image. It was a gesture to temporarily erase my own chest and to embody a masculine presentation that resonated with my gender expression.

I developed the images as one would a traditional B&W photograph, though because the emulsion was hand painted, it was imperfectly coated, whereas the emulsion was layered more densely in certain areas. This thickened texture prevented the emulsion to completely fix, resulting in the browning of the images when exposed to light. This work presses against the value of photography’s grayscale standard, (Black and white binary) which has had immense effects on our abilities to literally and conceptually represent people who reside outside of binaries.