The Vestibule, Seattle, WA | Curated by Kascha Semonovitch

In the two-person exhibition Too Much to Carry, curator Kascha Semonovitch brought together artists Mary Coss and Mana Mehrabian to explore the weight of personal and ancestral migration through sculpture and installation. The work considers how stories persist across generations, encoded in memory and material.

Coss’s sculptural installation anchors ancestral names rendered in wire and embedded within an abstracted vessel, creating a symbolic space of lineage and loss. In dialogue with this work, the gallery published Coss’s chapbook of micro-memoirs, Core Samples. Layered like sediment, these short prose pieces present moments from the lives of her foremothers, tracing how displacement, resilience, and silence shape inherited identity. The format mirrors Coss’s sculptural work: poetic, elemental, and excavated from lived history. You can order the book here