Chidi Ukwuoma: Containing Matter is on view at Matter Studio Gallery, Los Angeles
May 31 – June 28, 2026
Matter Studio Gallery presents Containing Matter, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Chidi Ukwuoma. Bringing together ceramic vessels, wall-based reliefs, and a video-embedded sculpture made between 2025 and 2026, the exhibition considers the vessel as both an ancient form and a contemporary site of transformation.
At Matter Studio Gallery, the exhibition showcases Ukwuoma’s expanding engagement with clay as a material for thinking through memory, movement, the body, and the land. Historically made to hold, store, carry, protect, and transport, the vessel becomes, in Ukwuoma’s hands, a structure through which the instability of containment is made visible. Clay is approached as a responsive material, one that registers touch, pressure, gravity, heat, and time.
A central group of vessel-based sculptures, including I’ve Known Rivers, The Bridge, Emergence, Catching Light, Weather Report, The Crossing, Higher Ground, Flex, Nightfall, and The Well, extends the ceramic container into symbolic and bodily form. Amphora-like silhouettes, narrow towers, hybrid containers, and open vessels suggest functional archetypes while also operating as figures, carriers, monuments, and relics. Handles become shoulders; openings become mouths, wounds, or portals.
The surfaces of the works are marked by ceramic glazes and graphite, producing fields that pool, darken, fracture, and descend across the clay. Rather than functioning as decoration, glaze becomes an active force, recording movement across the surface. The works often appear weathered, as if marked by water, sediment, heat, erosion, and passage. In I’ve Known Rivers, the river becomes both image and inheritance, while The Crossing evokes movement, uncertainty, and survival without resolving into direct narrative.
The exhibition also shifts the vessel’s logic into the space of wall-based relief. Works such as Between Two Lands, Terrain I, Terrain II, and Body Map flatten and reconfigure ceramic form into planes that resemble maps, aerial landscapes, cross-sections, and anatomical fragments. Here, the body and the earth begin to mirror one another. Both hold memory, carry pressure, and bear the marks of what has passed through them. In this expanded sense, the vessel is not only an object, but a condition shared by bodies, landscapes, and histories.
Throughout Containing Matter, water functions as both metaphor and pressure. It appears through titles, surface behavior, and the repeated tension between containment and overflow. The works enter a broader art-historical conversation around water, drift, vulnerability, and endurance, recalling the charged maritime symbolism of paintings such as Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream while shifting that drama from painted scene to ceramic object. In Ukwuoma’s work, passage is embedded in form, surface, scar, opening, and weight.
In Held, a ceramic sculpture incorporates paint, a video monitor, and looping video, transforming the vessel into an aperture. The work opens clay onto time-based media, complicating the ancient logic of the container through the contemporary language of the screen. What appears to be held inside the vessel exceeds its physical limits, suggesting that memory is not an inert substance stored within a body, but something active, repeating, flickering, and difficult to contain.
Emerging from Los Angeles’ layered histories of clay, assemblage, image-making, music, and cultural transmission, Containing Matter situates Ukwuoma’s practice within a contemporary field of material experimentation. His work moves between ceramics, painting, photography, print-based processes, sculptural materials, and sound, but clay provides a particularly charged ground. It allows the artist to bring abstraction into contact with touch, symbol into contact with weight, and image into contact with objecthood.
Chidi Ukwuoma was born in Los Angeles, California, where he lives and works. He is an interdisciplinary artist working across ceramics, painting, photography, print-based processes, sculptural materials, and sound. His practice examines memory as both a personal and collective structure, considering how images, objects, symbols, and cultural forms carry history, transmit meaning, and shift across time. Ukwuoma has exhibited at the Royal Academy, London; Band of Vices, Los Angeles; the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona; The Clay Studio, Philadelphia; Lancaster Museum of Art and History; Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles; Durden & Ray, Los Angeles; The Feel, Los Angeles; and other venues.
Contact
Chidi Ukwuoma, chidi@artbychidi.com
Matter Studio Gallery, karla@matterstudiogallery.com
Matter Studio Gallery
5080 W. Pico Boulevard
Los ANgeles, CA 90019
United States
Captions
- Installation views, Chidi Ukwuoma: Containing Matter, Matter Studio Gallery, Los Angeles, 2026. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist and Matter Studio Gallery
- Chidi Ukwuoma, Between Two Lands, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 13 x 15.5 x 4 in / 33.02 x 39.37 x 10.16 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
- Chidi Ukwuoma, Body Map, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glaze, 16 x 12 x 1.5 in / 40.64 x 30.48 x 3.81 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
- Chidi Ukwuoma, Catching Light, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 18.5 x 10 x 4.5 in / 46.99 x 25.4 x 11.43 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
- Chidi Ukwuoma, Higher Ground, 2025. Earthenware with ceramic glazes, 18.5 x 12.5 x 3.5 in / 46.99 x 31.75 x 8.89 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
- Chidi Ukwuoma, In Pursuit of the Third, 2025. Earthenware with ceramic glazes, 17.5 x 10 x 3 in / 44.45 x 25.4 x 7.62 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
- Chidi Ukwuoma, I’ve Known Rivers, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 18.5 x 9.5 x 4 in / 46.99 x 24.13 x 10.16 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
- Chidi Ukwuoma, Terrain II, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 15 x 16 x 2 in / 38.1 x 40.64 x 5.08 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
- Chidi Ukwuoma, The Bridge, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 18.5 x 9.5 x 3.5 in / 46.99 x 24.13 x 8.89 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
- Chidi Ukwuoma, The Crossing, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 12.5 x 6 x 2.5 in / 31.75 x 15.24 x 6.35 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
