The Green Gallery is excited to present Sahar Khoury and RJ Messineo, Turned, April 10 through May 16, 2026. This will be both artists' first time showing at the gallery, however they each have ties to the area: Khoury was a 2024 and 2025 Kohler Co. Arts/Industry resident and Messineo is a frequent visitor to Milwaukee and the gallery. This also marks the first time the duo have shown work side-by-side, despite being sustained friends and sharing representation by New York gallery, CANADA. Turned puts Khoury and Messineo's work in social conversation, not as a cohesive aesthetic statement. The title, conceived by Messineo, carries multiple registers — rotation, transformation, and in Khoury's words, the sense of something having turned, with decay and change quietly present alongside.
Khoury employs an intuitive approach to composition, utilizing a range of materials and techniques including ceramic, concrete, papier-mâché, resin, textiles, paint, metal, and wood, among others. The anthropological concept of structural vulnerability — seeking patterns in cultures to reveal normalization — is the framework at the center of her thinking process. She frequently draws upon objects she describes as "rejected, ubiquitous, unwanted," and often uses these objects as molds or surfaces for reliefs that appear repeatedly across bodies of work to make new meanings.
The works in Turned emerge from two three-month residencies at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin in 2024 and 2025, where Khoury had access to an industrial-scale metal foundry and ceramics pottery. While casting and mold-making have always been central to her practice, the Kohler residency pushed these processes to a new industrial scale. Her initial choice of props for casting was rooted in a personal geography: born in Chicago, Khoury has long been drawn to the Great Lakes and Lake Michigan as source material. Situated in the gallery are the kinetic works Backstroke 1 and Backstroke 2, which reimagine boat propellers cast in porcelain. Stacked and slowly turning at one rotation per minute, the forms suggest a spinal column or a blooming flower — mechanical marine hardware transformed into something deliberate and fragile, expending energy without moving forward. During her time in Wisconsin she also returned to something more intimate — the Arab bread markets of her youth, revisiting them in Milwaukee to source breads for casting. She cast Lebanese spinach pies from Bread House in Milwaukee, using the sculpted food triangles exactly as received from the purveyor and casting them in Kohler's resin-bonded sand, each cast unique, later assembled as hardware within her larger constructions. Turned marks a special occasion: Khoury brings these works back to Wisconsin, reuniting them with the Kohler mold makers who helped produce the castings.
Messineo makes paintings involving observation and abstraction. Concerned with the ways the personal is intertwined with larger systems of picture-making, the works implicate their body and combine references to nature, the studio, windows, other paintings, music and texts. In Turned, Messineo rehangs four paintings that were first exhibited in 2020. The paintings are meditations on the time and scale of vision. A painting of the sky at sunset is cut up and rearranged as a stack of fragments. Another composition is a silvery shadow drawn in paint as it was cast on the surface of the canvas. The flickers of sky and light through leaves are built up materially in paint on a painting that takes the shape of her open studio window. Break 1,2,3, a three part painting, was made to be an unfixed composition and Turned presents the opportunity to hang it in a second configuration. The fifth painting in the show Criss-Cross from 2023 borrows from Ellworth Kelly’s found color collages - studies for his Colors For a Large Wall - and draws a connection between that and the foundness of color on a walk in the woods.
Messineo engages a wide and sometimes incongruous range of scale relationships, mark-making, and compositional structures — from expressionist gesture to process-based systems and chance encounters. Many of the large paintings incorporate sheets of plywood adhered to the surface of the canvas, often extending beyond the rectangular picture plane to create idiosyncratic shapes. The compositions are designed to remain in motion: Messineo shifts the panels around throughout the making of a painting, adding, removing, and interchanging them, the end point always in question. Their new commission for the 59th Carnegie International, If the word we, opens at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh on May 2, 2026 — concurrently with Turned.
We look forward to bringing these two practices together for the first time. Both are fundamentally concerned with what happens when unlike things are asked to share a space — Khoury in her constructions, where disparate objects find new meaning through proximity, and Messineo in paintings built from panels that shift and reconfigure, the end point always provisional. Whether the connection between them is social, structural, or something else entirely, we welcome your perspective in person this weekend.