Glass Rice is proud to present Portals, a duo exhibition of new work by Kieu Tran and Trishla Jain. In a captivating display of practices rooted in meditation and surrender, Jain’s abstract paintings and Tran’s ceramic sculptures work in tandem as thresholds offering a look into the healing qualities of their work.

Jain’s paintings are deeply influenced by her spiritual practice. Samadhi, a state of undisturbed peaceful consciousness free from time and space, is a crucial point of entry into understanding and experiencing her work. Oscillating between seated meditation (stillness) and active meditation (painting), Jain structures her work around organized dots and lines in her yantra series, while maintaining a mindfulness of breath throughout.

An array of earthly tones carefully marked by a dot or line fills each cell of the golden grids that make up the entirety of the canvas. The gold oil paint repels the watercolor pigments, creating a swirling kaleidoscopic pool in each cell - like two magnets, pushing and drawing each other in an unpredictable dance. This positive-negative force is also seen in her grid-less tantra series on a macro level. In this systematic and logical approach, Jain is better able to enter a state of samadhi. It is within this structure and acceptance that a flow-state and freedom arise - allowing her to surrender to the process and remain present in the moment.

Similarly, in centering her creative process around introspection, meditation, and the interconnectedness of humanity, Tran’s ceramic sculptures take on biomorphic forms representative of what she imagines to be the human soul. Inspired initially by her emotional landscape and personal history, she animates her forms by sculpting feelings of loss, belonging, and the yearning for love. In anchoring her own human experience into the material, Tran begins a wordless, yet earnest conversation with the viewer through her sculptures - the sensuous forms acting as a gateway to introspective learning.

Tran’s innate draw to clay comes from its ability to hold memory as a material. In the artist’s words:

Clay is an interesting material because it holds memory. Like people, clay bears the imprints of external forces that shape and mold it, encapsulating memories that define its essence.” This profound connection to the material allows Tran to physically infuse her work with a record of her movements, emotions, and time - building up each form with traditional coil, pinch, and slab techniques. Each sculpture is a snapshot of an emotional state frozen in time - a psychological self-portrait.

In this exhibition, central to each of Tran’s sculptures is an opening - a portal. The negative space serves as a nucleus in which the form expands outward. The openings also act as windows framing Jain’s metaphysical paintings. Portals take viewers on a visual journey of what can manifest from self-reflection, the act of surrendering, and the profound transformation of creating from a non-judgmental and harmonious place.

Kieu Tran is a first-generation Vietnamese American artist based in Oakland, California. She creates elegant, sensuous, biomorphic ceramic sculptures that exist somewhere between the abstract and figurative. In her work, Kieu strives to give expression to emotion, to allow the aesthetic of the form to tell you something about the inspiration behind the piece on a wordless, instinctual level. She considers her sculptures to be an effort that gives form to the human soul and reminds us of our shared humanity.

For studies, Kieu obtained a bachelor’s degree in art history from UCLA and studied art while living in Italy and Germany. In 2014, Kieu followed an intriguing pull to Silicon Valley where she learned to code 2014 and soon after became a full-time software engineer. On a parallel path, she also developed a serious ceramic art practice. Immersing in the two practices side-by-side, Kieu eventually realized that she was always meant to be an artist. In January of 2021, Kieu left tech to pursue her passion of becoming a full-time artist.

Tran has exhibited at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Art Miami, Art Market SF, and various Bay Area galleries. Featured in Interior Design Magazine, Surface Magazine, Sight Unseen, EST Living, and Design Anthology Asia, her art resides in private collections worldwide.

Trishla Jain (b. 1985) is a self-taught artist who grew up in New Delhi and is now based in Palo Alto, California. She describes herself as an abstract artist and meditation practitioner. She studied English Literature at Stanford University (2007), followed by the Teaching of English at Columbia University, New York (2008). In 2009, Jain returned to India and her childhood foray with the canvas. She had two monographic exhibitions and several group shows between 2010 and 2014. Her early works, autobiographical in nature, were mixed-media assemblages of text, images, and found objects. Over time the images dissolved into a choreographed interplay of lines, dots, and dashes, moving her work into metaphorical realms of breathing, meditation, and mindfulness.

In 2015, Jain returned to live in Palo Alto with her family. Here, her daily meditation practice began to integrate with her painting. Moving beyond the autobiographical and into the space of a larger collective consciousness of the ‘present’, Jain's recent work harnesses breath awareness and ‘Samādhi’, the human mind’s innate capacity for deep, undisturbed peace and focus. She describes her paintings as devotional practice and pure meditation on canvas.

The artist will have her first solo exhibition at Akara Contemporary in Mumbai in August 2023 where she will exhibit her most recent series ‘Yantra’ and ‘Tantra’, which she has been creating since 2020. Both series converse with each other yet take on individual identities of control and letting go, of pattern and abstraction, of awareness and transcendence. Jain akins these works to the principle of yin and yang, where ‘Yantra’ and ‘Tantra’ “behave as a pair of equal opposites - the inhale and exhale - that balance and complement each other.