Antecedents

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Antecedents, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Yaron Michael Hakim. Adopted from Colombia as an infant, Hakim draws on his personal history and on interviews with other Colombian adoptees in a body of work that considers the interconnected stories we tell about ourselves, our families and cultures. These stories do not resolve into linear narratives or static identities, but exist instead as ever-changing collections of memories, influences, and dreams.

Hakim's practice is rooted in his search for personal origins. Following his displacement through adoption and an itinerant childhood that spanned three continents, he has worked to rediscover his cultural heritage and grow his own family in Los Angeles. Hakim’s paintings are always on recycled sailcloth, a material that represents ideas of movement and transformation for the artist. While his past bodies of work have focused on personal experiences, Antecedents foregrounds the experience of others whom he has interviewed about their adoptions and reunions with birth families. In these paintings, their stories become surreal portraits and narrative scenes. Human figures blend and intertwine with tropical plants against the real and imagined landscapes of Colombia. They reference, at once, the drama and monumentality of Diego Velázquez and the strange beauty of the anthropomorphic figures from the ancient Americas.

Hakim’s Ancestor gourds map the family trees of nine Colombian adoptees. Each sculpture is a gourd the artist grew in his garden, which is engraved with an individual’s birth family and adopted family trees, with no distinction drawn between the two. Unknown relations are marked with a circle, signifying their absence. In ancient South American cultures, gourds were commonly used as vessels, and had symbolic associations with women and fertility. In these sculptures, mothers, both known and unknown, are connected to the adoptees’ lost motherland of Colombia.

Throughout Antecedents, Hakim draws on the concept of creolization as explored by Martiniquais writer and thinker Édouard Glissant. Glissant wrote that creolization occurs when “the most distant and most heterogeneous elements possible [are] put into relation with each other. This produces unforeseeable results.”¹ Hakim’s work is produced from a constellation of diverse citations and inspirations. The flora and fauna he depicts are not all native to Colombia, but rather imports that have become pervasive symbols of the Caribbean and parts of South America, like sugar cane and mangoes. The magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez is also an inspiration, as are narratives and memories of adoptees, the art historical work of Diego Velázquez, botanical illustrations, personal narrative, and the ecologies of Colombia. There are no boundaries between these sources, and Hakim combines them to produce images that speak to cultural connectedness and a shared search for meaning.