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Rachel Hakimian Emenaker: Deep Roots Among Fallen Trees

A large painting of a street scene with people and cars walking along a building lined street

March 1 – May 11, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 1 from 7 – 10PM

At the intersection of globalization, migration, and memory, Deep Roots Among Fallen Trees offers a reflection on architecture as a space where loss and regeneration coexist, where memory is both preserved and erased. This installation delves into how diasporic communities continue to develop complex cultural landscapes despite being torn from their roots, forging new identities and histories through the fusion of old and new, memory and materiality. It explores how ancestral knowledge endures, not as a static inheritance, but as aliving process shaped by displacement, resilience, and the passage of time. In tracing these shifts, Rachel Hakimian Emenaker reveals architecture as more than a physical structure; it becomes a vessel of cultural continuity and reinvention across generations.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rachel Hakimian Emenaker is an Armenian-American artist raised between Paramaribo, Suriname, and Moscow, Russia. She received her MFA from UCLA in 2024. Drawing from Eastern and Western art and craft practices, she explores materials with histories of commodification along global trade routes, blending them to examine geopolitics, globalization, erasure, and cultural memory. Through installations, she reimagines architecture as a symbolic space where histories collide, languages and identities engage, and migration and erasure intersect. She seeks to uncover and reimagine what has been lost, erased, or forgotten, preserving diasporic memory through her work.

CURATOR

This exhibition is curated by Savannah Lee, GCAC Curatorial Associate.