The (Il)Logic of Things / The Garden We Carry
By Yohanna M. Roa
Curator
WhiteBox Portable @ MTA presents The (Il)Logic of Things by D. Dominick Lombardi and The Garden We Carry by QinZa Najm. Both artists share an interest in the capacity of material culture to produce knowledge beyond representation. Through assemblage, collage, painting, and installation, they reveal that objects not only preserve memory but also organize relationships among histories, affects, and everyday experience. Although their material vocabularies differ, both understand the reconfiguration of objects as a means of generating new forms of meaning.
Objects retain the traces of their making, the labor that produced them, the uses they have accumulated, and the many histories they silently carry. Rather than erasing those experiences, their surfaces allow different temporalities, uses, and meanings to remain simultaneously present. At the same time, they contain unrealized futures, thereby acquiring the potential to participate in new constellations of meaning. Both Lombardi and Najm begin precisely from this moment of transformation. Their practices recover materials and objects that have already lived other lives, not to preserve them as relics, but to activate the memories they contain. Assemblage becomes a way of thinking through matter itself, where fragments cease merely to illustrate history and instead begin to reconstruct it.