“are there roots where the ground trembles?” is a solo exhibition by malavika rao, featuring ceramics and patchwork installation that considers how a place becomes liveable when permanence is uncertain.

The exhibition features a growing population of strange ceramic creature-dwellings: porous structures with alcoves, openings, chambers, and interiors that draw from dollhouses, earthen and adobe architecture, and vernacular building traditions. Though empty, the structures suggest that something has already lived there, or might be arriving. Patchwork installation made from inherited materials partially enclose the sculptures, transforming the gallery into a provisional dwelling, carrying traces of family, migration, and the making and remaking of home.

The work imagines dwelling in a world shaped by ecological change, migration, and shifting relationships to place – where architecture is not simply something we inhabit, but something that might itself become a neighbor, a feeling, a creature, or a home in the making.

Exhibition on view—
October 22nd to 26th, 2026
12 – 6 PM

Opening Reception—
Saturday, October 24, 2026
6 – 10 PM

Strange Soft Sculptures (Workshop led by malavika rao)— TICKETS (Sliding scale: $15 – $40)
Friday, October 23, 2026
2 – 6 PM
Join us in transforming fabric scraps, stuffing, and thread into strange textile forms of their own imagining – with openings, cavities, pockets, appendages, and unexpected ways of holding and being held.

About malavika rao: 
malavika rao is a multidisciplinary artist and educator working primarily in painting, fiber, ceramics, and installation. Their practice considers homemaking as a form of worldmaking, exploring how people construct home, belonging, and relationships to place amid histories of migration, ecological change, and inherited structures of care. Working across craft and installation, malavika creates speculative environments that sit between the familiar and the strange, asking what it means to inhabit a world that is constantly changing.

malavika works as an artist and educator in Los Angeles, where they are invested in building community-based arts programs and creating spaces for people to come together through artmaking. They have taught at Colorado College, Otis College of Art and Design, the Armory Center for the Arts, and LA Tactile Lab, and have led workshops at CalArts, Craft Contemporary, Nova Community Arts, and Heavy Manners Library. Their community-based work includes the LA Community Solidarity Quilt, an ongoing collaborative project that brings together artists and community members through collective textile-making. Their work has been exhibited at Coburn Gallery,  SOMArts Cultural Center, Yiwei Gallery, Valence Projects, Human Resources, and Venice Art Walk, among others.