Curator Sahar Tarighi returns to Blockfort with Surface as Sentence, a curated exhibition of ceramic work. From the curator:

Across histories, masks have mediated between self and world, concealment and revelation. Made for ritual, performance, protection, or disguise, they carry shifting purposes. This exhibition approaches the mask as both psychological and personal threshold. As Jung observed, the mask—or persona—is the face we adapt for the world, while behind it lingers the shadow of what remains hidden. Yet as bell hooks reminds us, many masks are shaped by domination—coverings that silence, distort, or demand performance until they are remade.

In these works, the mask becomes a double symbol: both universal and situated, at once the psychic threshold of all selves and the material weight of specific histories. Clay, as the chosen medium, grounds these explorations: pliable yet fragile, marked by touch and fire, it mirrors the psyche’s own tensions of memory, resilience, and transformation.

These masks confront us as active propositions, reminding that identity is never fixed: it cracks, glazes, conceals, resists, and transforms. Some speak through folklore, others through the intimate weight of personal history.

Together, they reveal that the mask is not only something worn but also something spoken: a sentence of clay embodying multiplicity. To look at them is to encounter the paradox Oscar Wilde once described—“Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” These works dwell in that paradox, asking us to see the mask not as absence of self, but as a vessel through which selves—hidden, fractured, and in formation—come into presence.

Please join us on January 16th, 2026, 6-8pm for the opening reception in Gallery B.