Jungle Head, 2021

Jungle Head is a body of sculptural work that dances around Khan’s spatiotemporal consciousness and identity. The work was constructed in Khan’s kitchen during the Covid-19 lockdown earlier this year, and in the London Metropolitan studio. Khan’s practice cultivates medium/large sculptural work with wood, papier- mâché, paint, and natural material. The work reflects cultural references from her childhood in Hawaiʻi combined with current cultural references and varying strands of thoughts/images within her current environment. It projects universality, exposes generic linear limitations within imagery, and encourages multivalency and communal awareness to operate simultaneously.

Khan’s childhood growing up in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi as a member of the non-indigenous population and outside of the conventional American experience has disoriented her sense of belonging. Perpetually an outsider in the place she is most familiar. Anywhere outside of Oʻahu produces the same experience. Khan’s paradoxical position thrusts her into a perpetual tornado of undeviated active realization within reality. Her interests lie in this site of hybrid identity and promotes active experiences/interactions. She perpetuates a subjective outlook of time, place and reality.

For Jungle Head, Khan presents amalgamations of the object, the human, and natural world. She finds that made objects alone can become a source of discord rather than dialogue and discovery. She turns to organic representational aesthetics to recreate a mutation of reality. The results are works interpreting complex layers and interactions of her current surroundings. The most recent example of this, is a display of her experience on Sunday (Sept. 12th) evening. Khan went for a walk around her surrounding neighborhood of Deptford and collected foliage. She took them home, put on a movie and made the lei that lay around the London weeds and lei. Her practice is intrigued and fueled by time, location, ecology, belonging and personal identity. She hopes to present these themes in ways that can recover, resist, reconstruct and rebuild.