With the sunlight behind it, Tarrah Aroonsakool's massive, suspended maze glows white and nearly translucent. A closer look reveals all sorts of strange, found objects affixed to the white panels hanging from the ceiling — there are tea bags, dried ramen noodles and human hair — but from afar it looks ethereal and delicate.
"I wanted to build an interactive maze. Something that I've learned since I was in high school is: Given a canvas or any space, is to take as much of it as possible and create as much with it as possible," Aroonsakool said.
Her maze takes up plenty of space at the Athenaeum Art Center in Logan Heights.
Aroonsakool worked mostly with toilet seat covers and tissue, crumpled and reconstructed into massive, delicate panels. Woven and attached throughout are more found objects and trash, ranging from prayer beads to a torn-up Seafood City bag from National City.
Memory, fragility and disorientation
Aroonsakool's maze is a study of assimilation, particularly for Asian immigrants and first generation Asian Americans, and the way families try to build new lives and pursue the elusive American Dream, while also maintaining a semblance of home.
She also wants visitors to find the maze disorienting, distracting, and a bit unsettling. This — and the bunched up tissue — speaks to the fragility of the American dream.
Food plays a complicated, huge role in immigrant families, whether in assimilating with the diets of their new homes, or the foods, recipes and traditions brought with them. Food also taps into relatability, nostalgia and memories, regardless of someone's background.
"There's like some Lay's chips here that have — it's Thai Lay's chips, and it's things that we can identify with, but there's a lot of influence of every culture in every culture, I think. Nothing comes from nowhere," Aroonsakool said.
An old, crumpled bag of potato chips, even if that exact brand wasn't the one you had in your home, still evokes a flash of recognition. Both the specificity and the shared origins of things, and the way ideas, memories, beliefs and tastes take root in a person, are interwoven in the maze.
Insects play a role in the installation, too, with plastic cockroaches hanging in the maze and a striking, sculptural centipede installation on the gallery's wall. If the white material of the maze represents the American dream, the insects are a reminder of its unattainability. Aroonsakool also finds something akin to hope there.
"I grew up in a house full of roaches. So if my parents see this, I'm sorry, it's true," Aroonsakool said, laughing. "They're resilient, and they don't mean any harm. I find that people find it gross, and I kind of find it comforting," she said.
A fragile society prone to racism
Aroonsakool's work explores how susceptible American society is to racism, and whether it's in her own experience as a first-generation Thai-Lao American
"Essentially, it's about structural racism, and personally speaking from my experience, is the assimilation of Asian culture into white American society and what that means for each narrative. So each sheet in this maze kind of represents that," she said.
As visitors make their way through the maze, they'll see more prominent tufts of hair. Aroonsakool wanted to explore how anti-Blackness has historically thrived in Asian American communities. She knew this could mean a ramped-up sense of discomfort.
"The hair you see here represents a lot of different things and different cultures, but I definitely think that hair is something that we all try to maintain in some certain way, so that kind of represents an anti-Blackness, too — as something that we always have to check ourselves on," Aroonsakool said.
Tucked away in the maze are several small altar-like groupings of loose white rice and sculptures on the floor, with suspended sculptures hanging above them. These groupings interrupt the flow of the maze, and were inspired by the formation of rock in caves, and the way caves redeposit minerals.
"I think that structural racism sort of goes unseen unless you're confronted with it directly, or affected by it," Aroonsakool said.
'When it's done, it'll tell me'
Aroonsakool shares a studio space with a handful of other artists in North Park. Tucked behind a mechanic's garage, the space is unassuming and tidy but bursting with creativity.
Her life-size pig carcass sculptures are suspended from the ceiling in one corner, and another work-in-progress hangs above a small table covered in paints, sketchbooks and journals.
To create "Through the Maze," she worked on the panels simultaneously in her studio, bouncing between each piece. When asked how she knows a work is complete, she reflects on the process of making the maze panel-by-panel — 48 giant panels in total.
"When it's done, it'll tell me," she said. "Because if I just keep on working on one the whole time, I will never be done with it."
Getting 'a little lost'
The beauty in Aroonsakool's work is not unintentional, and it's not beside the point.
"I think that a lot of people need things to be sort of picturesque so they could digest it a little bit more. I think my purpose of this installation is so people could be engulfed and feel comfortable enough — like I said, I use household items — so people would be more open-minded to step in," she said. "I didn't make it thinking about its Instagramability, but I did make it thinking that I want it to be beautiful and alluring when you first walked in."
Christopher Padilla manages the gallery and curated the exhibition. He said that Aroonsakool's art is both alluring and in-your-face.
"I've been following Tara's work for a couple of years now," said Padilla. "Something about her pieces just draws you to it, and it makes you really confront it. It was nice to be able to bring it in here and just blow it up to a scale where you are forced as a viewer to essentially walk through a massive piece."
He said the relevance of the piece is how it speaks to cultural erasure and the difficulties and discomfort of navigating assimilation in the United States.
"What better way to do it than people have to navigate a physical maze itself, get a little lost," Padilla said.
Tarrah Aroonsakool: "Through the Maze"
On view through May 3, 2024
Gallery hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday
Open late every second Saturday for Barrio Art Crawl
Athenaeum Art Center, 1955 Julian Ave., Logan Heights. Free.
ljathenaeum.org
