Object Poetry

Kohn Gallery, Highland Avenue 1227, 90038, Los Angeles

July 27, 2026 – August 26, 2026

On view through September 12th. Gallery 1 & 2. Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present Object Poetry, an active observation and engagement with sculptures that inhabit the lacunae where language lapses. The featured works–spanning performance, kinetics, and assemblage–use sound, light, video, movement and found objects as structural mnemonic devices. Across three “verses,” or participatory environments, the presentation asks, “What possibilities do these forms make actual?” Guided by this central question, adopted from artist, Intermedia theorist, and Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins, the exhibition engages the viewer as a physical and emotional participant. Object Poetry opens June 11th and will be on view through September 12, 2026. Rather than representations, the human and non-human sculptures by artists Ian Burns, Bruce Conner, Tony Oursler, Chiffon Thomas, and Cajsa von Zeipel are reconfigurations of the psychological, physical and meta-physical human experience. Thomas embodies a new modality of existence through a sonic and performative inversion of human and architectural faculties, while von Zeipel situates post-capitalist themes in a futuristic, human-object cyborg, and Burns in a kinetic live-feedback sculpture of everyday objects. Oursler’s audio-visual sculpture projects a media-saturated consciousness onto an electronic entity, and Conner reduces feeling to a conceptual melding of found objects. In between each point of origin from which the artists build, and augment, are constructions united by their intermedial entanglement with sonic vibrations, lo-fi experimentation, digital performance, and ephemeral qualities. Object Poetry proposes an attentive look at material’s capacity to tangibly articulate the poetics of memory; identity; consumption; and the psyche. The forms are not surrogates for ideas but their terrestrial manifestations. Object Poetry opens June 11, 2026, at Michael Kohn Gallery and will be on view through September 12, 2026. During the final week of the exhibition, Chiffon Thomas will activate his sculpture, Untitled (Dome Figure I), with a durational performance titled Polish.