M. LeBlanc is proud to present artist and poet Manal Kara’s long-awaited debut solo exhibition at the gallery. Titled Syntax-Semantics Interface, the exhibition presents a new suite of works that are as much concrete poems as they are contemporary painting.

In 2014, Kara relocated from Chicago, twelve miles south to Gary, Indiana, situated in a beach community between Gary’s U.S. Steel plant and the beautiful sand dunes. The sculptures born out of this setting are crude assemblage. Much like Kara’s work titled ‘Cognitive Architecture’ (2024) that’s included in the exhibition, their sculpture is cobbled together from bits of gnarled wood, ROIs (rusty objects of interest), and laser-cut acrylic -- amalgamated psycho-geographic composites elaborating a poetics of the peasantry.

Syntax-Semantics Interface marks Kara’s first major foray into painting. Operating as acts of speculation into radical linguistic systems, many of the works hold conjectural elements in modular association. For example, in the front of the gallery, one is to triangulate much-little, beheading, and consequence as well as the space between much-little-beheading-consequence, overdetermined, and instantiation-cinema-formthekiss. Here, new ontologies can arise.

Another work titled ‘The Madness Praying for Land 600 Sucking Objects’ (2024) is an asemic poem abstracted from its original glyphs. In it, Kara keeps certain conceptual elisions and discards others. Kara’s ongoing interest in understanding sympoietic systems, or conceptual ecologies of self-organization, like language, is a vehicle for investigation: proposed systems expand the field by flattening the plane. 

The exhibition is on view beginning May 31st through July 6th, 2024; please contact info@mleblancchicago.com for more information.

Manal Kara (b. 1986) is a Moroccan-American self-taught interdisciplinary artist working between Gary, Indiana and Queens, New York. Select solo exhibitions include Sacred Topologies, Deli Gallery, New York (2023); Hypothèses, Pangée, Montréal (2022); Conjectures, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2022); Xylem & Phlöem, No Place, Columbus (2021); The Viewing-Room vs. The Adoring-Gaze, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2020); Song of the Other Worm, Prairie, Chicago (2019), and Tearassin’ Like a Slug Outta Heaven, Basketshop, Cincinnati (2019). They have attended residencies at 8th House, Shandaken: Storm King, ACRE, Ox-Bow, September Spring at the Kesey Farm, and Project Freewill.