James Fuentes Gallery

James Fuentes is pleased to present Chanel Khoury, Memory Bands in Los Angeles.

Chanel Khoury’s work is deeply technical, driven by forces simultaneously slow, digital, ancient, and bright. Her oil paintings begin through a lengthy process of virtual world-building, intuiting an untouched world containing the primordial essence of life. Glistening, transparent forms resemble those found in the smallest markers and grandest phenomena of nature: spheres, spirals, columns, basins, and mirror-images. Bit by bit, Khoury meticulously transposes still images of this world into oil paint on canvas. Memory Bands represents works realized from this universe over the past two years, as well as site-responsive elements.

This body of work finds its textures and forms in deep-sea beings, archeological holy sites, and computational glitches. The ctenophore (or comb jelly) is a central figure. This bioluminescent marine invertebrate resembles digital ectoplasm, yet emerged around 740 million years ago as one of the earliest complex animals and a significant evolutionary step toward human life. Made up mostly of water, we know most about them through photographs. Those images, sometimes pixelated, refract in patterns across the shifting surfaces in Khoury’s compositions. As if echoing their proximity to us in space-time, these photographic details reappear in the darkened “sky” and reflective coils of (rhythm version) (2024-25), or in the tessellated far-ground of orbital column (2024-25).

In Nexus (2023-24) Khoury ideates another epic event: an infinitely repeating portal. The work pictures the opening of an archway over a rectangular abyss, out of which rows of clear spheres float like weightless water droplets toward a vanishing point. The scene recurs and distorts through the internal curvature of these suspended orbs. Thus the “nexus” evokes an eternal entrance between untold future and distant geological past, like prehistoric waterways convening to form a cradle of future life. In conversation with Nexus, and the only image evading a landscape, ball is life (lodestar) (2025) forms an altarpiece to the orb itself as the true birthplace of all being.

At a certain juncture, Khoury’s process resembles an archeological exploration, moving through the synthetic landscape, zooming out and into its textures, and illuminating new vantage points. Like peering into early stone reliefs, her works attempt to behold in their curves and shadows a fragment of a complex truth carried forth from a world out of our touch. The structures built within echo the mysteries of ancient architectural sites, reaching for the realm of the gods. Through painting, Khoury then performs a kind of extended ritual beyond decision-making. Bridging realms—the primeval and futuristic, dark and luminescent, virtual and physical, biotic and synthetic—this is an endeavor driven by an implicit curiosity about the formation of being and the inherent wisdom of every living cell. Like the entire visual field reflected inside a single orb, that personal curiosity and infinite wisdom might be two of the same thing.