Gordon Robichaux is pleased to present H2O, Ava Woo Kaufman’s debut solo exhibition at the gallery following her participation in two recent group shows. For this occasion, the artist brings together eight artworks created between 2021 and 2025 that employ a wide range of materials and processes including weaving, watercolor, and found textiles and objects. Presented here as a site-responsive installation, the works remain open to varied configurations and modes of presentation beyond the exhibition.

In her ongoing practice, Woo Kaufman makes garments from deadstock textiles sourced from jobbers and ragpickers. A jobber in Paris sold her a section of fabric (silk applied to canvas) that he attributed to Dior, which the artist has incorporated within a new artwork, Untitled (ʻAnaehoʻomalu fishponds, Kuʻualiʻi and Kahapapa) (2024–2025). Nailed to a wall in the gallery, the yardage forms the ground for a layered collage, with two watercolors on paper taped to the glass within a large, found open-back frame. The watercolors, which depict preserved fishponds the artist visited north of Kona in Hawai‘i, appear to float over the surface of the silk. Once used to harvest fish for kings, these ponds formed part of the larger land-tenure system known as ahupua‘a, which centered on access to stream waters. Today a Marriott hotel development envelops them, and Native Hawaiian stewards protect the ponds.

A recent assemblage, Untitled (angel food memory, white and yellow, needle threader) (2024–2025), is presented in the gallery on a pedestal designed and painted by the artist with Sumi ink. The central element of the work is a weaving made with deadstock Bunka, a Japanese embroidery thread typically unraveled into individual strands. Instead, the artist maintained the whole cord, onto which she embroidered the word “angel” and attached a needle threader emblazoned with the Trans World Airlines (TWA) logo. Previously wall-hung, here the object is laid on a silk remnant from Aichi, Japan. Of the work, the artist remarks: “The remnant is likely a fragment from a deconstructed kimono, which the current generation shows waning interest in preserving as heirlooms.”

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Expanding across the bottom of the gallery’s east-facing wall, Untitled (ATLAS) is a triptych of works on paper made with watercolors and wax and displayed on a ream of deadstock silver wallpaper that previously belonged to the artist’s grandmother. Each of the watercolor paintings depicts a different yet related image—thin vertical bands of saturated color, the artist’s gardening gloves, and a cropped view of wires against the sky—surrounded by a narrow wax border. After starting the pieces in early January of 2025, the painting process transitioned into a method of prayer as the fires in Los Angeles erupted and spread.

Throughout her work, Woo Kaufman explores the chance encounter between material pairs or material lovers. She asks how one finds wholeness amid the discarded refuse we are awash in, adrift in time and space, and the fundamental choices we face in how to mirror our humanity in everything we touch.

When I’m in the air I am weightless. Wind pierces through each interstice of the feathers. Find weight in the water. Find fish, find krill. Find plant and sand. Find earth when I’m feeling brave. Dig dig. In the earth with my mouth in the air with my nose. Friends come friends go. Make formations find direction. Clouds are sweet. Cover me shield vision. Bit of fear bit of pleasure. Not knowing where you’re going as you charge through the sweet. Dry is clear and clear is day. When you see the forest for what is laid. Leaves and twigs and spines. Find some miraculous pool. Seeing my eyes, glinted reflection of air and blue. Find new pool. See eyes. Find spine. Return to air.