Elijah Wheat Showroom spiritedly presents a solo exhibition “Loves Cats, Hates Catastrophes” by multi-disciplinary artist and musician, Michael Hambouz, his first with EWS. 

Do you have stories about seemingly inconsequential moments where you make a decision and the ramifications have life-altering consequences? Perhaps even in recalling the history of your family, where your lineage was forced into difficult positions and decisions were enacted to protect life and changed the course of not only your life now, but your epigenetic make-up? 

Hambouz shares his story: “[His] teenage father, little aunts and uncles, and grandparents were survivors of the Lydda Massacre and forced Death March of 1948. [his] father Kahlil, the oldest of the children, was the first to leave the UNRWA refugee camps in Ramallah, first traveling to Europe, then eventually landing in the US.” Hambouz’s father suffered from haunting PTSD and had a very difficult time being a stable parent. The damage rippled and radiated from this atrocity–despite Hambouz never experiencing first-hand what it is like to live on the land, and having no immediate Palestinian community as a kid growing up in the rural Midwest. Subsequent stories are embedded in the generational trauma that has given life to a curiosity, a mission, to break the mold of abuse and release the violence that is rooted in Hambouz’s personal reflection, placed symbolically within his moving relief paintings.  

Hambouz’s delicately crafted works of art, infused with an autobiographical element, break a mold of surface and allow viewers to see differently, from many angles. Like a witness to a story unfolding, there are varied vantage points with winding locales of entry. Hambouz “create[s] maze-like forms to reference both the architecture of enclosed spaces and the constricting claustrophobic feelings [he] experience[s] being a Palestinian-American with a voice struggling to be heard and for [his] identity to be respected.” Mainly, in the current social media clusterfuck, where everyone has ‘expert’ opinions on everything, and threats of violence, demeaning communications, slander, libel and ‘shadowbanning’ unfavorable opinions are par-for-the course. Hambouz’s experience, translated in directionless forms, begets an experience face-on, recognizing the acute craftsmanship embedded and confronting conceptual integrity by way of the subjectivity of varied divisions. 

Within this body of Hambouz’s diverse and experimental practice, the paintings’ relief and ventricular undulations are meticulously hand formed, painted and assembled with imagery laden with repeating patterns, like music. These objects d’art subtly embed representational form with a personal and recognized symbolism. Moving through the ever-changing stance of perspective, Hambouz’s work, with distinct color pallets, reconning form and the weight of conception, continues to command the vanguard of painting. 

One thing is certain though, his comment “commonality of marginalized people brings a Universality of sentiments” sits with an audience. Here, lies a curiosity about a place of contrariness, disparity, inequality and imbalance. The existing curiosity advances an aspiration to inject radical acceptance, nuance and keen criticality in order to overcome an omnifarious verisimilitude in a narrative. 

Whether our ancestors were forced to make difficult choices to survive, or, decisions were made for them, our stories possess a history of cascading social randomness— one decision leading to another, leading to our own narrative. However sheltered by your family line, you are here now. Together, we can discuss our personal histories, our tragedies, our fortunate placement within the context of another vantage point. That way, we conscientiously make decisions that aren’t just flukes in our lineage, but rather, both gives and saves lives.

Michael Hambouz (b. Niles, Michigan, 1977) is a multidisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist musician, and independent curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Hambouz creates chromaesthesia-influenced works – experiments in dimension and color made under the guidance of music – to process bouts of loss and reflections on life in the rural Midwest, New York City, and in the cybersphere as a first-generation Palestinian-American. Experimenting freely with mediums, he encourages unexpected results and mutations in compositional form to bloom in the studio, resulting in conceptually abstracted paintings and prints, intricate layered paper cut outs, sculpture, drawings and animations.

Solo/two-person exhibitions include Spring/Break Art Show (NYC), Neighbors (NYC), chashama (NYC), Kayrock (NYC), Troutbeck (Amenia, NY), The Krasl Art Center (St. Joseph, MI), 3S Artspace (Portsmouth, NH), Future Fairs with Talia Levitt (NYC), Brooklyn Academy of Music with Michael O’Shea (NYC), and a 20-year survey exhibition at Antioch College (Yellow Springs, OH) in 2018. Select group exhibitions include The National Arts Club (NYC), Club Rhubarb (NYC), Andrew Edlin Gallery (NYC), IPCNY (NYC), GROWROOM//SHOWROOM (NYC), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Standard Space (Sharon, CT), Dominique Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Northern-Southern (Austin, TX), Eve Leibe Gallery (London, UK), and The Centre for Contemporary Printmaking, (Bangor, N. Ireland). His art and curatorial work have been featured in Artnet News, The New York Times, Design Milk, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, and Vice. His work can be seen in the collections of Antioch College, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NYU Langone Medical Center, Niles History Center, and Fidelity Corporate Art Collection.