A joint exhibition between Eyewash gallery and Gallery Boreas, Urban Designs features one large sculpture and seven drawings by New York-based artist Linda Ganjian.

In her new sculpture L.I.C. (Lovely Infrastructure Capriccio), she uses the Middle Eastern carpet-for its visual richness as well as its symbolic weight-as a framework to present contemporary reality, offering a vast landscape of miniature handcrafted forms that evoke sensations related to her experience of Long Island City, Queens, where her studio is located. The neighborhood is characterized by a discordant mix of industrial and residential spaces, highway over- and under-passes, intersecting subway and commuter trains, and a towering display of billboards over the horizon.

Ganjian’s minute sculptures are modeled after these elements and textures, while taking them beyond the literal. Ultimately, the work is an attempt to contain memories and impressions of physical and psychological spaces and to present them in a highly-organized manner, as a way of transforming the ephemeral into symbolic form.

Ganjian’s drawings respond more specifically to motifs within carpets and their potential to suggest new narratives, while bringing together ancient and contemporary visual vocabularies.