June Edmonds: Inheritance | Sherin Guirguis: Into the Lake of Fire // ⲉ̀ϧⲟⲩⲛ ⲉ̀ϯⲗⲩⲙⲛⲏ ⲛ̀ⲭ̀ⲣⲱⲙ)
about exhibition
June Edmonds: Inheritance invites critical reflection on the relationship between memory, national identity, and collective responsibility. Contextualized within a moment when Black and Brown presence and histories are increasingly targeted for erasure, the exhibition is a direct call to confront the stains of American history and envision a more equitable future.
Inheritance revisits Edmonds’ iconic Flag series, reimagining the American flag as a mutable symbol whose promises of freedom and belonging remain unevenly realized. While earlier iterations honored individual figures and events in Black American history, these new paintings address the broader systemic injustices shaping the lives of American citizens and immigrants. Rather than treating the emblem as a fixed national monument, Edmonds presents it as a contested site where idealized projections collide with lived contradictions. Through these individual works, the exhibition rejects a monolithic national ethos, inviting viewers to reconsider the flag’s visual and social power through a liberatory lens.
In this body of work, Edmonds’ Standing Flag compositions are disrupted by abstract stain formations that evoke blights, phantoms, topographies, or scars. These mucky marks serve as metaphors for unresolved histories and current events, emphasizing that the flag has never symbolized liberty or justice for all. Functioning as both a disruption and a revelation, the distortion draws attention to suppressed historical narratives, demanding the recognition and accountability required for meaningful change. By interrupting the flag’s familiar patterns, Edmonds asserts that confronting difficult histories is necessary to break cycles of injustice.
Central to Edmonds’ practice is a distinctive approach to color theory that centers brown as a site of beauty, complexity, and possibility. Working with a kaleidoscopic spectrum of browns, she challenges conventional artistic hierarchies while celebrating the richness of melanin. Although the stain interrupts each canvas, it does not always carry the same punctuation, some take a dominate force, others creep up on you. At times in the foreground, though most often in the background, the sludgy ruptures are enveloped by rhythmic cascades of impasto that create meditative fields of color. The paintings become sites of process, remembrance, and healing, affirming transformation despite generational trauma. Read more here
Press Release
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Sherin Guirguis: Into the Lake of Fire (ⲉ̀ϧⲟⲩⲛ ⲉ̀ϯⲗⲩⲙⲛⲏ ⲛ̀ⲭ̀ⲣⲱⲙ), a solo exhibition envisioning Indigenous Egyptian language revitalization. The exhibition runs from September 12 to October 24, 2026. An opening reception will be held Saturday, September 12, from 4-7 pm.
Egyptian American artist Sherin Guirguis presents a series of monoprints created during her recent Sam Francis Foundation “Call to Dream” Fellowship in Paris, France. Drawn from research with heritage objects held in Parisian institutions, the series explores cultural memory, honoring ancestral languages at risk of being forgotten.
The exhibition’s title, Into the Lake of Fire (ⲉ̀ϧⲟⲩⲛ ⲉ̀ϯⲗⲩⲙⲛⲏ ⲛ̀ⲭ̀ⲣⲱⲙ), references a transformative passage from the ancient text Spells of Coming Forth by Day, long mistranslated by European archaeologists as The Book of the Dead. Through her engagement with Egyptian archives, ritual objects, and community, Guirguis rethinks systems of representation, preservation, and access. By re-centering the perspectives of Indigenous Egyptians (RemenKeemi, “People of the Black Soil”), the work exposes the gaps produced through colonial knowledge systems and Egyptomania, creating space for reclamation and self-empowerment.
Repetition—both inherent to monoprint and central to Guirguis’ practice—functions as a formal strategy and ritual of cultural remembrance. Delicate patterns and glyphs are assembled, transferred, and transformed through successive impressions, each gesture generating new forms and meanings. Sacred symbols representing nature, protection, and divinity recur throughout the compositions, evoking the rites of ancestral wisdom. Their fluid patterns echo the movement of the Nile, translating geological, spiritual, and cosmological relationships into expressive visual forms.
Color and materiality hold significance as Guirguis employs pigments historically used in Egyptian art and architecture. Gold, faience blue, carnelian red, and ochre create chromatic fields to dissolve the boundaries between water and fire, sky and land, past and future. With these inks luminously layered on silky matte black paper, the works simultaneously evoke the velvet-lined display cases of museums and the mythologies of a fertile abyss. Through the collective of repetitive gestures, Into the Lake of Fire (ⲉ̀ϧⲟⲩⲛ ⲉ̀ϯⲗⲩⲙⲛⲏ ⲛ̀ⲭ̀ⲣⲱⲙ), becomes a mnemonic device celebrating RemenKeemi histories while imagining new possibilities for their continued presence and future.
Sherin Guirguis (b. 1974, Luxor, Egypt) lives and works between Egypt and Los Angeles, CA. Guirguis has exhibited nationally and internationally. Solo museum exhibitions include Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; The Minnesota Museum of American Art, St Paul, MN; Tahrir Cultural Center, American University, Cairo, EG; and Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; along with numerous group exhibitions of note. Commissioned public works include Forever Is Now, Art D’Égypte, UNESCO World Heritage Site: Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, EG; Desert X Biennial, AlUla, SA; Desert X Biennial, Palm Springs, CA; METRO Los Angeles, CA.
Her works can be found in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA; United States Department of State, Washington, DC; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul, MN; Doris Duke Foundation, NY, NY; Qatar Art Foundation, Doha, QA; and numerous private collections. Guirguis holds an MFA in painting from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, and a BA in art from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.