Los Angeles as Site for Diasporic Ghosts

· May 30, 2025

In paintings, ceramics, and installations, Rachel Hakimian Emenaker depicts scenes of gentrification, religion, and homeland.

Renée Reizman

Hyperallergic

SANTA ANA, California — Rachel Hakimian Emenaker paints contemporary life in Los Angeles and abroad, but her canvases mostly conjure ghosts. The Armenian-American artist’s solo exhibition at Grand Central Art Center at California State University, Fullerton, Deep Roots Among Fallen Trees, depicts scenes of gentrification, religion, and homeland in paintings, ceramics, and installations. But with limited information present, it’s not clear if these images recreate memories from Armenia or the other places Emenaker was raised in, including Paramaribo, Suriname, and Moscow, Russia.

The only clear point of reference is modern-day Los Angeles, which can be identified by a large logo for the local Armenian-owned fast food chain Zankou Chicken. The logo, a giant “Z,” looms behind passersby in the installation “Within a Diasporic Architecture” (2024), an artwork composed of four batik-on-canvas panels that hang loosely from simple wooden structures, creating a private box in which to view the city scenes. There is nothing on the reverse side of the canvases, and no gap signaling where to enter the installation, so seeing the work requires one to brush a panel aside, like brushing aside a veil and crossing from the world of the living to the dead.

In each batik, Emenaker inverts her linework’s color, turning the typically black contours into bright white outlines. This, coupled with the material’s tendency to create translucent and variant pigments, makes all the subjects appear as if spirits from the afterlife. There are ghostly grandmothers roaming the streets in babushkas, and eerie children in church clothes.

Religion reverberates throughout the exhibition. Another boxed-in batik installation comprises three individual works: “Traces #5,” “Traces #6,” and “Traces #7” (each 2025). The canvases, which face outward, look as if the artist transposed quick sketches into batik form, including church facades, interiors, and scaffolding. An echoing sound emanates from “Untitled” (2024), a squat, ceramic-tiled box at the center of the installation. The noises it produces aren’t distinct, suggesting a memory more than a sermon, but the ceramic structure looks like it could be the cornerstone for a historic church.

Indeed, Emenaker is as fond of ceramics as she is of batik and painting. She shaped large chunks of porcelain into beads to create “365 Prayers/ 365 Fists” (2025), an enormous rosary that hangs from the wall and drapes onto the floor. She also laid down glazed ceramic tile to create the mosaic path “Untitled Floor” (2024), which alternates between scenes rendered in traditional blue and white porcelain with designs painted onto variant brown earthenware. She paints haloed iconoclastic saints in her comicbook-like style, but also repeats motifs of bootleg Disney characters, cats, and exploding bombs — childhood memories seem to be intertwined with religion, greed, and war.

Could those issues be the reason Emenaker depicts her homes as ghostly landscapes rather than solid ground? Without firmly anchoring her artworks to a specific era, Emenaker’s artworks are unmoored from time — they could reflect her past, or foreshadow a vanishing act in the future.

Rachel Hakimian Emenaker: Deep Roots Among Fallen Trees continues at Grand Central Art Center at California State University, Fullerton (125 North Broadway, Santa Ana, California) through May 11. The exhibition was curated by Savannah Lee.