With sunlight behind it, Tarrah Aroonsakool’s massive, hanging labyrinth glows white and almost translucent. A closer look reveals all sorts of odd found objects attached to the white panels hanging from the ceiling – there are tea bags, dried ramen noodles and human hair – but from a distance it looks ethereal and delicate.
“I wanted to create an interactive maze. Something I’ve learned since I was in high school is: like a given canvas or any space, is to take as much as you can from it and create as much as you can with it,” Aroonsakool said.
Her maze takes up a lot of space at the Athenaeum Art Center in Logan Heights.
Aroonsakool works primarily with toilet seat covers and fabrics crumpled and reconstructed into massive, delicate panels. Woven and attached throughout are other found objects and trash, ranging from prayer beads to a torn Seafood City bag from National City.
Memory, frailty and disorientation
Aroonsakool’s Labyrinth is an exploration of assimilation, particularly for Asian immigrants and first-generation Asian Americans, and how families try to build new lives and pursue the elusive American dream while maintaining a semblance of home.
She also wants visitors to find the maze disorienting, distracting and a little unsettling. This – and the fabric that has accumulated – speaks to the fragility of the American dream.
Food plays a complex, huge role in immigrant families, whether in assimilating to the diets of their new homes or the foods, recipes, and traditions brought with them. Food also taps into connection, nostalgia and memories, regardless of one’s background.
“There’s a sort of Lay’s chips here that they have—those are Thai Lay’s chips, and those are things we can identify with, but I think there’s a big influence of every culture in every culture. Nothing comes from nothing,” Arunsakul said.
An old, crumpled bag of chips, even if the exact brand isn’t the one you had in your home, still evokes a flash of recognition. Woven into the labyrinth are both the specific and the general origins of things, as well as the way in which ideas, memories, beliefs, and tastes take root in man.
Insects also play a role in the installation, with plastic cockroaches hanging in the maze and an impressive sculptural installation of a centipede on the gallery wall. If the white material of the maze represents the American dream, the insects are a reminder of its unattainability. Aroonsakool also finds something akin to hope there.
“I grew up in a house full of cockroaches. So if my parents see this, I’m sorry, it’s true,” Arunsakul said, laughing. “They are durable and mean no harm. I find that people find it gross and I find it comforting,” she said.
Fragile society prone to racism
Aroonsakool’s work explores how susceptible American society is to racism and whether this is in her own experience as a first-generation Thai-Lao American
“It’s basically about structural racism, and speaking personally from my experience, is the assimilation of Asian culture into white American society and what that means for every narrative. So each leaf in this maze represents something like that,” she said.
As visitors make their way through the maze, they will see more prominent strands of hair. Aroonsakool wanted to explore how anti-blackness has historically flourished in Asian American communities. He knew it could mean an increased sense of discomfort.
“The hair that you see here represents a lot of different things and different cultures, but I definitely think that hair is something that we all try to maintain in a certain way, so it also represents anti-blackness – as something that we always have to check ourselves,” Arunsakul said.
Hidden within the maze are several small altar-like groups of loose white rice and sculptures on the floor, with sculptures hanging above them. These groupings break up the flow of the maze and are inspired by the formation of rock in caves and the way caves re-deposit minerals.
“I think structural racism remains invisible unless you directly encounter it or are affected by it,” Arunsacol said.
“He’ll tell me when he’s done”
Aroonsakool shares a studio with a handful of other artists in North Park. Tucked away behind a mechanic’s garage, the space is unassuming and uncluttered, but buzzing with creativity.
Her life-size sculptures of pig carcasses hang from the ceiling in one corner, and another work-in-progress hangs above a small table covered with paints, sketchbooks and journals.
To create Through the Labyrinth, she worked on the panels simultaneously in her studio, bouncing between each piece. When asked how she knows a work is complete, she reflects on the process of making the maze panel by panel — 48 giant panels in all.
“When he’s done, he’ll tell me,” she said. “Because if I keep working on one all the time, I’ll never be done with it.”
To “get a little lost”
The beauty in Aroonsakool’s work is not unintentional and not off target.
“I think a lot of people need things to be kind of picturesque so they can digest them a little bit more. I think my goal with this installation is that people can be absorbed and feel comfortable enough — like I said, I’m using household elements — that people would be more open-minded to intervene,” she said. “I didn’t make him think about his Instagram capability, but I made him think that I want it to be pretty and inviting when you first walk in.”
Christopher Padilla manages the gallery and curates the exhibition. He said Aroonsakool’s art is both seductive and in-your-face.
“I’ve been following Tara’s work for several years,” Padilla said. “Something about her pieces just draws you to it and makes you really face it. It was nice to be able to bring it here and just blow it up to a scale where you’re forced as a viewer to walk through a massive piece.”
He said the work’s relevance is that it speaks to cultural erasure and the difficulty and discomfort of navigating assimilation in the United States.
“What better way to do it than to have people navigate the physical maze itself, get lost a little bit,” Padilla said.