Mitra Fabian at George Billis Los Angeles presents a delicacy of sculpture which titillates the mind with curiosity. These works undoubtedly capture a fastidiousness to her method while also appearing sensuously gentle in form. It is this gentleness, despite the defensive extensions of prickliness, which make the sculptures self-described as “organic”. And further to this remark, the organisms – each with names like Peep, Prickle, Skitter, and Slunk – can be classified due to their self-similarity with the aqueous and crustaceous.

Thus, Ms. Fabian is extending our concepts of form through a beautiful synthesis of the organic with humanity’s newfound grasp of electric material – resistors – in causing the digital world we are inundated in. She takes lifeless porcelain and imbues it with a reticent dynamism that is characteristically “alive”. True, the motion is imperceptible; but so too is the motion in everyday concepts of matter. We do not, for instance, see the boisterous molecules of water in a glass kinetically distract us as we drink. And how convenient, it is, to compare her efforts at causing a biological homage than a sterilized one of crude inanimation. Does not our transient material consumption disconcern us with the quality of our means? By the very nature of our industrial and now digital society, seldom do we extend towards means which are ends in themselves.

Our very effortless control of motion now is paradoxically delivered in the opposite direction of the infinite and toward the ephemeral. Bewildering, then, that the efforts of the biological kingdom which demonstrate such exquisite geometries to our perception in their own aims at equilibrium dance to a beat of a different drum. The providence of Minerva’s Owl ought to instruct us to behave better, with what Ms. Fabian finely expresses as elegantly to our vocabulary, and synonymously beautifully minimally. For with more elegant motion we converge towards an ideal world, one which balances our effects to promote more splendorous causes – moving away from misery and towards Paradise.