Driftwork

Across diverse artistic practices, remains and trace emerge as frameworks for investigating - on material, theoretical and psychic levels - the condition of lasting-ness as a generative threshold. These remnants – archival traces, chemical imprints, ghostly echoes and ritual gestures – find form in the artists’ hands. They are scraped into canvases, stitched into fragile paper, blurred in image, conjured in shadow and silhouette, and mapped across analogue, digital and sonic registers. In these guises, they operate as active sites where fragments register and unsettle the intersections of social history, institutional structure, diasporic pull and erosive presences.

These constellations of thought create an atmosphere that returns us to the scar, the grain, the singular trace – as Toni Morrison reminded us in her 1975 lecture at Portland State University: to make fragments yield the life they contain. This exhibition enacts the fragment as resonance – an active remainder that insists, unsettles and yields new forms of thought and creation.

The artists here take up remnants as both material and method. Anique Jordan reanimates erased histories through “impossible images,” where archives, absence and inheritance materialize as portals. Wura-Natasha Ogunji cuts, stitches and traces fragile surfaces, composing choreographies where longing and apparition shape rituals of becoming. Janiva Ellis scrapes and erodes her canvases, fractured surfaces holding tension between ruin, abundance and uneasy illumination. Sydney Cain conjures spectral worlds in graphite and soot, drawings that flicker like apparitions, dissolving as they take form.

Shaniqwa Jarvis reconfigures photographs into fragments and collages, suturing memory while acknowledging its rupture. Sidony O’Neal builds provisional structures from fragments and systems, staging recursive spaces where rigour and indeterminacy collide. Nandipha Mntambo transforms abstract surfaces with gold leaf and shadow, exploring hybridity, rupture and the shape-shifting nature of myth. Lebohang Kganye transforms family archives into theatrical tableaux, exposing history and memory as ongoing acts of construction.

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan transforms salvaged and ornamental matter into cosmological instruments, attuned to ancestral presence and spiritual resonance. Sandra Brewster transfers images into creased, ruptured surfaces, where motion and memory trace diasporic presence. Zalika Azim creates ritual devices and kinetic compositions, where everyday gesture channels ancestral memory and spiritual ascent.

Driftwork is permeated by a sense of reverie, where remains drift between material, psychic and social registers. These works are impressions, unsettled presences that invite audiences to move slowly, to sense what lingers at the edge of perception.

Text: Essence Harden

Essence Harden is the co-curator of Made in LA 2025 at The Hammer Museum and Curator of the Focus section for Frieze LA, 2024 through 2026. Harden has curated exhibitions at the California African American Museum (CAAM), The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), Art + Practice, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), and Oakland Museum of California, amongst others. She has consistently engaged with Southern Guild’s programme since the Los Angeles gallery opened in February 2024, as a moderator, panelist and advisor.

She is a contributor to The Los Angeles Times Image Magazine, SSENSE, Art21, Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), Artsy, Cultured Magazine and Performa Magazine. Harden has written catalogue entries for Made in LA 2025; California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold; Made in LA: Acts of Living, OCMA; Prospect 5: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, New Orleans; Brave New Worlds: Exploration of Space, Palm Springs Art Museum; and What Needs to Be Said: Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts. She has also served as an art consultant for film and television.

Harden is a 2025 recipient of the Teiger Foundation research grant, a 2018 recipient of The Creative Capital, Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and a 2020 Annenberg Innovation Lab Civic Media Fellow. She previously served as a Visual Arts Curator at the California African American Museum.

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