Habibti’s Castle

Maryam Yousif and Nick Makanna in conversation with Liam Ze’ev O’Connor

Looking at Maryam Yousif and Nick Makanna's work is like looking through a prism. You can see reflections of so many different styles and colors: the playful irreverence of Bay Area Funk, the shapes and colors of Memphis Modern, the architecture of ancient Sumerian cities, the fashion trends of 1970s Baghdad, or the spiky prongs of Sutro Tower. And yet, at the core of this dispersed scattering of potential influences and references, lives a body of work that is joyous - equal parts silly and serious.

Most recently, Yousif and Makanna installed new works collaboratively in an exhibition titled Habibti’s Castle, with San Francisco's Guerrero Gallery, not indoors, but in a backyard in the city's Bayview Neighborhood. I had the chance to talk to them about this unique exhibition opportunity and their experience making these new pieces throughout the pandemic.

Liam: Where are you working from right now?

Maryam: We’re currently based in Chicago until next summer. I’m in my second and final year of an AICAD teaching fellowship in the ceramics department at SAIC. We’re here with our adorable dog and we just took the plunge and bought an air conditioner from Craigslist in the last few weeks of summer.

Liam: How did this show come together? What’s been your relationship with Guerrero Gallery?

Nick: The show came together while we were still in Chicago, our momentum had stagnated a bit since being here, and we wanted to put a show on the books that would motivate us and force us to make work, so we spoke to Andres about doing something in his backyard in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. I was really excited by what Parker Gallery was putting together in LA. They created a rotating show of sculptures that could be seen by just walking onto someone's lawn, and then even created a faux art fair booth that was outdoors all out of plywood, where they showed works by this amazing old school Bay Area textile artist Franklin Williams, so that certainly influenced our thinking.

At the time, Andres, who runs Guerrero Gallery, had just made the decision to close up his gallery space at the end of April, so he was looking for other models with which to continue the gallery project and this made perfect sense. I’ve known Andres for a while now, since I started grad school in SF in 2014 or so, and Maryam and I have both shown with him a few times at this point. II even helped him run his last space from 2016 until we left for Chicago last year. He’s got great energy and a real DIY ethos that I appreciate, and since his last space closed he’s been doing all kinds of weird pop-ups, like creating online exhibitions of works staged within this abandoned warehouse on the edges of San Francisco - stuff that I can’t imagine any other gallerist having the patience for.

Liam: How do you feel the garden setting/the presentation affected your understanding of the work? Like Maryam’s sculpture “Laymoon.” To my eyes, it mirrors the round form of the cactus on the left. Or this one, in a more literal sense, with the flower motif and the succulents nearby?

Maryam: The garden setting affected my work completely. It was kind of all happening in real time. I was making work knowing that it was going to be in this garden, and that’s actually how I prefer to work. I always have a hard time making a body of work until I know the space where I’ll be showing and then I start planning around that. We visited and hung out there for a while, and I walked around and thought about where I would place things, so it definitely affected my output. The first time we went there Andres gave us lemons to take home from the lemon tree, later I thought of that tree and wanted to make something specific for it. The figures holding plates on their heads are usually carrying a jug or a vessel, and for this piece I wanted her to carry a lemon as an offering from the garden, and made her a base that has a plate coming off the side that would have a pile of lemons. The guests were welcome to take one. For the rest of the pieces, I was inspired to add more florals for sure. I was already using flowers and palm trees in previous pieces, but I think the setting influenced me to kick it up a notch.

Nick: Yeah it was really interesting to make work for a space that was so untraditional in a sense, after really only being used to showing work in white cube galleries. The pieces kind of melted into the surroundings, and both our color palettes are pretty poppy and saturated, so that worked really nicely with all the colors from the garden. Some pieces were made in direct response, like Maryam’s piece offering lemons, or my taller white piece that has these green shrubs at the base and at the top has all these fired coils that I glazed different colors and put through holes in the piece melting it all together in the kiln, which reminded me of a cactus.

Liam: The work seems so joyful to me, especially Maryam’s figures, they are just so beautiful! Is this something you thought about while making the work? There’s a celebratory feel to the whole installation, and I find that interesting in contrast to what we are living through right now.

Maryam: Oh thank you! It might have been a reaction to the garden in a sense. It’s a beautiful space, and being there I certainly felt more at peace. I think I wanted whatever I was going to put there to heighten that sense or feeling, and not to detract from it.

The objects themselves function as capsules - non-linear symbols of my experience as an immigrant, of assimilating, of the past, near and ancient and so on. I mean I don’t know that they’re a contrast to what we’re living through, we’re always living through something. And even if they don’t convey exact elements of all the terribleness in the world, I still feel them as a person and they’re a sort of a reaction to all of that.

I think the other part of it is that after years of assimilating to western culture, and then going back to learning more about my roots and trying to slowly unpack all of that...that experience is giving me a sense of belonging. And I end up wanting to share what I’m learning, and the beauty and joy that I’m experiencing. There is enough darkness in the world, and it feels good to create and share a space where people can feel something else. And if my work can bring joy...well that’s pretty nice. I’ll take it!

Nick: I agree I think both of our works, and Maryam’s especially, really carry a kind of energy to them, which I think in part came from the excitement of returning to the Bay Area. Returning to our studio, and some kind of normalcy in all that, and making work for an audience, even if it was mostly just our friends, was really motivating. Also our practices both revolve around the creation of alternative worlds, and we each found a really therapeutic kind of refuge in that, even if it is kind of a self-indulgent act. The garden only enhanced this aspect. It felt like a really pronounced kind of sanctuary, both personally, and also for viewers, from this constrictive normalcy that’s taken hold since the beginning of quarantine.

Liam: I noticed how many pieces involve stacking: So many of Nick’s pieces, as towers are themselves stacked, or composed of stacked elements, and Maryam, your piece “infinity strength” is a stack of sorts. And in this show, many of the pieces are stacked on cinder blocks, bricks, wood, (one is stacked on wood, stacked on an old bathtub). Or in the case of “Dishdasha Girl on Moon Column” you stacked Maryam’s piece on top of Nick’s to make a new work... How do you see the role of stacking in this show?

Maryam: That’s funny I don’t know why I didn’t think of the stacking that was happening when we were installing the work with the bricks and wood! I love that. I honestly think the stacking is Nick’s influence! I think it also came out of not wanting my work to be lost in the garden, especially since I tend to make smaller work. Stacking seemed like the perfect solution for giving works height and it was a new way of working for me which was exciting. I’m very into being able to have modular work so in most cases the pieces work well enough on their own or you can swap certain elements too.

Nick: Yeah i’ve used stacking for a while now just as a means of creating ceramic work that interacts more with the body and veers further away from our expectations of what our most common association of what the medium is, primarily a mug or plate that can fit in our hand or lap. In grad school I was lucky enough to have a brief studio visit with one of my art heroes, Ron Nagle, who’s in his 80s now, and makes these incredibly poetic cosmic landscapes that are usually about 6 inches in each direction. He told me that my work really needed to get bigger, which I thought was so strange coming from him, but in the end it’s the direction I’ve gone, and I think it’s really expanded the possibilities of what my pieces can be. Stacking as a strategy is just kind of a necessity as we work with a kiln that’s about 2ft deep and wide - but in a sense it's also an homage to artists that used a stacking method to make massive works like Viola Frey, who is such an important figure within the Bay Area and contemporary ceramic history at large Theymade these monumental pieces that were made up of smaller parts that composed this larger whole.

Liam: I keep coming back to the stacking, and ancient Mesopotamian forms like the Ziggurat, which you touch on a little in the press release (votive offerings in temples, at least…)

Both of your works connect to both contemporary and ancient traditions, architectures, and pop culture. Could each of you walk me through some of the references/connections in the work?

Maryam: Ancient mesopotamian themes are always there for me, it’s really a mix of oral history, mementos, ancient artifacts, pop culture..of being an Assyrian, Iraqi, Canadian, American.. and a lingering sense of yearning to connect back or to protect my roots.

For this show, one of the initial seeds for this work came from the sewing I was learning as a hobby during quarantine, especially elements like gathers and ruffles. I was spending hours looking at vintage patterns online and loving the colors and illustrations, and was making notes of which designs I liked. A lot of them were from the 70s, and they took me straight to these stacks of black and white photographs I have of my mother in college in Baghdad, that I’ve spent my entire life going through over and over again. You know, they’re like a portal into how my mom lived a few decades back, and how cool her and her friends looked. And she’d always say things like..”your grandmother made this dress for me” or “I made this vest” etc. It felt like a tangible connection to that history. I really wanted to incorporate this in my practice and then Nick reminded me of a figurine from my first solo show in 2017, and he nudged me to make something to that effect but with the dresses I like. They are loosely based on the votive figurines, at least in their conical construction, and some details from their garments, but they’re reimagined into a mix of part self-portrait, part Middle Eastern folklore, and village women who carry water jugs or food on their head to sell..but make it fashion?

The other prevalent form resembles handbags, which I started to explore in my last show at Guerrero. They’re based on these pieces I saw at the British Museum where Assyrian bas-reliefs of Gods were carrying bags or baskets, and there was even a stand alone bag-like form found at the cemetery at Ur that had eyes and rosettes. I think that was a stone weight. I was just really drawn to the form, and wanted to make my own version of it, or a contemporary version. A friend told me they look like containers of my culture, and I like the idea of this object containing a bit of myself but also reflecting the garden that it sits in all at once. Plus It’s really satisfying to be able to carry the work from the handle too.

Nick: In terms of references I think that I take a lot of inspiration from architecture and how we create and ornament structure, especially spaces that we deem sacred. Everything from gothic cathedral flourishes, to the red clay mosques in Djenne Mali, to the carved stone churches in Ethiopia, I love the drama and emotion imbued in spaces like these. There are also a lot of references closer to home in SF -with all the wrought iron window grates that populate the city, and the kind of hideously-beautiful Sutro Tower (for radio and tv) jutting up from the highest point of the city, as this pragmatic monument to entertainment.

For this show, I was more guided by a process of making that I stumbled upon when I first made these ceramic window grates for a show last year. I would compose these open lattice sections that were repeated and connected back to back to back, creating this sense of layering and resonance, with particular attention paid to creating openings in the lattice that could provide windows or portals through the works. For me these pieces have this simultaneous feeling of airiness - in that they’re all built from long coils of clay, so that they’re completely open in structure, but there’s also this kind of anxious claustrophobia in the dense repeated patterning, never providing a real sense of calm except for the small windows looking through the works.

Liam: The stacking in the show makes me think of Brancusi’s work, which often involves strange combinations of basic materials stacked on top of each other. To me that stacking has an almost "alchemical" energy: the materials create a new energy when they come together, that didn’t exist before. Do you all connect with the idea of alchemy your work?

Nick: I’ve never thought about our work in connection with Brancusi although I really like that, and the field of alchemy always feels kind of inherently connected to ceramics. Maryam teaches this history of ceramics course and she was telling me how basically the first european person to figure out how to imitate Chinese porcelain which had been a pretty closely guarded secret for centuries, had been jailed by a Polish king because he had lied about being able to produce gold. While he was holed up he somehow developed what would become the first European porcelain recipe which went into production in Meissen, Germany.

As for Brancusi, I feel like I come to sculpture more from the field of painting so I don’t consciously think of a lineage of sculptors that inspire me outside of the more recent history of the California Clay movement. But in Brancusi’s work I definitely see some reference to that in the whole 80s Memphis Modern design movement, which I love, and especially Peter Shire’s ceramic work which I also am super inspired by, so I think it does get layered in there somehow.

In terms of a certain kind of energy, I feel like ceramic because it’s so handmade or at least the stuff that we make is, it’s always ripe with this kind of emotion and pathos as it flops under its own weight or stubbornly tries to resist that impulse. For this show I made my first very vaguely figurative work, that I affectionately nicknamed “Spikey Punker” and was really surprised by the different kind of aura and magnetism that having even a vaguely person-esque 5 ft tall ceramic sculpture has.

Liam: What was the collaboration process like? Did you make the works together, or does the collaboration come from the decisions in how you paired and displayed the work?

Maryam: It was more like that we decided to show together. Other than asking each other for advice and opinion on things, we only really collaborated on one piece. And we both made the pieces separately then stacked them.

Nick: We didn’t really make the work together like I wasn’t helping her and vice versa, although we do that sometimes when needed. We already share so much physical and mental and emotional space with each other which has been so heightened by the quarantine, and we really rely on one another to help in making decisions and bouncing ideas etc., that I think the work was a lot more collaborative than we realized at the time.

I think it was just really cool to have both our bodies of work sharing a space, and interacting outside of just the studio context. It was nice to see just how many similarities there are.

Maryam: That’s so true. Our work always lives together side-by-side on our studio shelves, and in our home, but this is the first time they were intentionally coming together for an exhibition.

Nick: We made all the work in SF in a studio that we share, that thankfully has access to a kiln, so after being in Chicago and making stuff at home and driving it to be fired it was such a luxury to just finish something let it dry and load it straight into the kiln instead of having to schlep it in the backseat of the car seatbelted, hoping it survived the trip. It really allows us to push the scale and delicacy of our work in ways that I think makes it a lot better.

Liam: Do you have any lessons that you’re hoping to take forward into (hopefully) non-covid times in the future? Maybe in terms of making work, sharing work, alternative models?

Nick: I think it just showed us how essential it is to create your own opportunities, even in the absolute weirdest of times. This obviously isn’t anything new, artists have been exploring different ways of exhibiting and situating work forever, but I think so often we get hung up on waiting for the perfect opportunity to fall into our laps as opposed to just working with what’s available to us. I say more shows in backyards and gardens, under bridges and on random trails, more artists just putting their stuff out into the world in whatever form that takes and learning from the experience, good and bad.

Maryam: I agree with Nick. I also think that we need to continue nurturing our art community, we need to talk to each other more, share resources and opportunities and be kind to one another. There is so much mutual aid happening in our community, people raising funds for one another, or for an organization. We’re reassessing the foundations of our institutions and weeding out oppressive systems and that gives me hope for a better artworld.

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