Manal Kara: Syntax-Semantic Inter Face
M. LeBlanc is proud to present artist and poet Manal Kara鈥檚 long-awaited debut solo exhibition at the gallery. Titled Syntax-Semantics Interface, the exhibition presents a new suite of works that are as much concrete poems as they are contemporary painting.
In 2014, Kara relocated from Chicago, twelve miles south to Gary, Indiana, situated in a beach community between Gary鈥檚 U.S. Steel plant and the beautiful sand dunes. The sculptures born out of this setting are crude assemblage. Much like Kara鈥檚 work titled 鈥楥ognitive Architecture鈥� (2024) that鈥檚 included in the exhibition, their sculpture is cobbled together from bits of gnarled wood, ROIs (rusty objects of interest), and laser-cut acrylic -- amalgamated psycho-geographic composites elaborating a poetics of the peasantry.
Syntax-Semantics Interface marks Kara鈥檚 first major foray into painting. Operating as acts of speculation into radical linguistic systems, many of the works hold conjectural elements in modular association. For example, in the front of the gallery, one is to triangulate much-little, beheading, and consequence as well as the space between much-little-beheading-consequence, overdetermined, and instantiation-cinema-formthekiss. Here, new ontologies can arise.
Another work titled 鈥楾he Madness Praying for Land 600 Sucking Objects鈥� (2024) is an asemic poem abstracted from its original glyphs. In it, Kara keeps certain conceptual elisions and discards others. Kara鈥檚 ongoing interest in understanding sympoietic systems, or conceptual ecologies of self-organization, like language, is a vehicle for investigation: proposed systems expand the field by flattening the plane.
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M. LeBlanc is proud to present artist and poet Manal Kara鈥檚 long-awaited debut solo exhibition at the gallery. Titled Syntax-Semantics Interface, the exhibition presents a new suite of works that are as much concrete poems as they are contemporary painting.
In 2014, Kara relocated from Chicago, twelve miles south to Gary, Indiana, situated in a beach community between Gary鈥檚 U.S. Steel plant and the beautiful sand dunes. The sculptures born out of this setting are crude assemblage. Much like Kara鈥檚 work titled 鈥楥ognitive Architecture鈥� (2024) that鈥檚 included in the exhibition, their sculpture is cobbled together from bits of gnarled wood, ROIs (rusty objects of interest), and laser-cut acrylic -- amalgamated psycho-geographic composites elaborating a poetics of the peasantry.
Syntax-Semantics Interface marks Kara鈥檚 first major foray into painting. Operating as acts of speculation into radical linguistic systems, many of the works hold conjectural elements in modular association. For example, in the front of the gallery, one is to triangulate much-little, beheading, and consequence as well as the space between much-little-beheading-consequence, overdetermined, and instantiation-cinema-formthekiss. Here, new ontologies can arise.
Another work titled 鈥楾he Madness Praying for Land 600 Sucking Objects鈥� (2024) is an asemic poem abstracted from its original glyphs. In it, Kara keeps certain conceptual elisions and discards others. Kara鈥檚 ongoing interest in understanding sympoietic systems, or conceptual ecologies of self-organization, like language, is a vehicle for investigation: proposed systems expand the field by flattening the plane.
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