True Arizola-Lyons, Emily Lucas, Yuhan Hu

Call Me Back

 

Tutu Gallery

November 9, 2024  - January, 2025

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Tutu Gallery presents Call Me Back, a three-person exhibition by True Arizola-Lyons, Emily Lucas, and Yuhan Hu showcasing ceramics, photography on found objects, and other miscellaneous sculptures. Embracing fugitive states in form-making, the artists illude a girlhood frivolously immersed in the phenomenal world where time seems ambered. 

 

Instead of leading with an often-too-apparent argument on the female body vesselized, True Arizola-Lyons beckons to the longevity ceramics inherit as opposed to human flesh, “a fairly universal understanding amongst those who engage with clay”, as she puts it. With this awareness of object worthiness, True creates more easily and specifically each time she enters the studio. Her body of work becomes straightforward: quickly-made pots adorned with faces, hair, sometimes a teardrop or two, sometimes blush. As they take on new attitudes and moods, these pots are True’s archive of feelings, outliving herself, and sincere and honest in that they are nothing more than what they are. Eyes staring up at you, asking to be loved. 

 

A close friend to True, Emily Lucas finds freedom by utilizing fabricator materials through personal lived experience and girlhood fantasy. The works reflect Emily’s imagination in which the self can explore and value trivial things, aided by her ability to make independently. With castles made of concrete and plywood, porcelain that mimics 99cent store plastics, fragile heels adorned with pierce temporary tattoos, and big bulky cement in cutesy shapes replicating soft companions, the imagery records its power using materiality, informed by her feminist and queer school of thinking.

 

Playing a reversal and hallucinatory game of Emily’s approach, Yuhan Hu obscures imagery, text, and physical media until they cannot orient the viewers in the world. Working with found materials such as wood panels, flower petals, and a box of retired door handles, she amplifies the qualities they already have instead of altering them, with a lack of clear reason to bring elements of chance. She often extracts single frames to expand a video of something and has its content blurred, rendering them indistinguishable from the neighboring image. Symbols are translated into codes with pieces of information presenting as a puzzle, and they force your brain to slow down by splitting an event into milliseconds. 

 

April Z

10.28.2024