Rachel Hakimian Emenaker
The Wind Will Carry Your Traces
Luce Gallery, Turin
30 January - 7 march, 2025
Luce Gallery presents Rachel Hakimian Emenaker, The Wind Will Carry Your Traces. The show features eight batik paintings made from melted wax and hand applied dye. Through this unique approach, the artist reimagines and integrates ‘craft’ with the painting medium. Her composite cityscapes and interior scenes of everyday life convey profound familial and cultural histories, reflecting her diasporic upbringing. Rachel Hakimian Emenaker leans heavily into rich earth tones punctuated by vivid pops of burgundy, lemon, chartreuse, and indigo, heightening the visual impact of each composition. Her paintings are defined by thin yet saturated washes of dye, contrasted by crisp white linework that animates figures and details throughout each canvas. Together, the works in The Wind Will Carry Your Traces invite viewers to witness how diasporic histories and memories are integral in everyday life, fostering connections within communities.
The exhibition’s title, The Wind Will Carry Your Traces, poetically suggests how deeply held values and memories travel with us, shaping who we are no matter where we call home. Rachel Hakimian Emenaker’s ability to seamlessly blend Eastern and Western art traditions reflects her multicultural background and artistic journey infusing her work with remarkable depth. Of Armenian descent, she moved frequently during her formative years, living in Suriname, Russia and now the United States. This rich confluence of influences informs her work, drawing from European painting traditions, Armenian religious iconography, Soviet-era cinema, and ‘craft traditions’ from the Middle East and South America.
Having studied painting in undergraduate school, she gravitated toward the batik techniques she learned while growing up in Suriname, eventually integrating these methods with Western-style narrative compositions on canvas. Batik, a traditional Indonesian craft, involves creating intricate designs by applying melted wax to fabric and dyeing it in layers. The artist begins her process by drawing with melted wax to create distinctive, permanent lines on the canvas. As an unforgiving medium, wax leaves no room for error; every gesture—whether intentional or accidental—becomes a permanent element of the composition. After the wax dries, five to ten layers of dyes are applied with watercolor brushes, followed by a washing process to refine the colors. The canvas is then washed to remove the wax, leaving behind the crisp white lines that define their work. The final steps include drying, steaming the canvas flat, and attaching it to a stretcher, giving the piece a traditional painting appearance. This meticulous process is not only a technical feat but also a poignant metaphor for the artist's exploration of memory and cultural preservation.
A defining feature of Rachel Hakimian Emenaker’s work is the crisp white lines, which she describes as a form of “resistance.” Created by the wax’s resistance to dye, these lines give each painting a bold and cohesive structure. For the artist, this resistance symbolizes resilience in the face of erasure. The lines embody how people preserve and adapt cultural traditions, reconstructing memories into new forms that anchor them in a new home.
Her seminal painting, Traces, a wide main street winds through a vibrant village nestled in the hillside, where terracotta tiled-roofed buildings, postwar apartments, and octagonal churches coexist. A family strolls along a sidewalk while two women converse nearby, standing near a large puddle that shares the town’s reflection and energy. Here figures are painted entirely from recollection, often referencing family members or acquaintances, making each encounter deeply personal yet universally resonant. As with all the artist’s paintings, this scene is reconstructed from fragmented memories, family stories, and vivid descriptions, forming a collective diasporic memory brimming with detail and artifacts. The rolling hills in the background could easily symbolize inherited memories of Kessab, Syria, where ancient churches rise above towns, or evoke the lush green hills of Los Angeles in springtime, seamlessly blending past and present. The painting captures the essence of the diasporic experience: a liminal space where the boundaries of time and place dissolve, allowing distinct cultural and historical influences to coexist in one richly layered composition.
The strength of Rachel Hakimian Emenaker’s work lies in her ability to harness the labor-intensive nature of their medium to emphasize its conceptual depth. Each scene she creates feels as though it could exist anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere all at once, creating this intersection of familiarity and vagueness where memory is most at home. Hakimian Emenaker layers diverse architectural styles and distinct cultural objects that embody the diasporic experience, illustrating how individuals adapt to new environments by bringing familiar elements of Eastern and Western cultures, as well as regional nature motifs, into their new lives. Her paintings present a convergence of cities, aesthetics, and past worlds, blending them into a seamless recreation of diasporic memory. These works invite viewers to consider how memories and cultural fragments persist, transform, and coexist in new spaces, encouraging deeper engagement with the vibrant and multifaceted nature of the diasporic experience.
Rachel Hakimian Emenaker (Armenian-American, b. 1992) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in painting, installation, craft, sculpture, sound, and textiles. In 2024, she earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the UCLA Broad Art Center, Los Angeles (2024), and the American University of Armenia, Yerevan (2017), as well as in group exhibitions throughout California, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2017). Emenaker is the recipient of the 2024 Dedalus MFA Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture and the 2023 UCLA Elaine Krown Klein Fine Arts Scholarship. Her work is included in international private collections.
LUCE GALLERY
Largo Montebello, 40 - 10124 Torino
