Anna McNeary, Andrea Rey, Cecile Chong, Chin Chin Yang, David Smith, Elie Porter Trubert, Esperanza Cortes, Federico Solmi, Glen Taylor, Jelena Micić, Jesica Ramirez, Kathie Halfin, Peter Burr, Zoila Andrea Cocchang,
WhiteBox presents TerraTextl, a compelling exhibition allowing us to visualize diverse political and aesthetic approaches in the works of a group of 13 singular artists who investigate contemporary practices of textiles, fibers, and ceramics/terracotta, aiming to envision how these media, with ancient historical trajectories, connect with our present context and explore how they may uniquely contribute to distinctive creative methodologies and modes of signification.
Textiles and ceramics play vital roles in everyday objects, both indoors and outdoors. Despite appearing vastly different at first glance, they have much in common and share a similar tactile aesthetic language that shifts between hard, unwieldy, and soft, pliable, flowing. We can associate sculpturally layered textiles with warmth and flexibility, starkly contrasting the cool fragility of ceramics formed from soft clay or loam. The materials, shapes, and meanings reveal a broad spectrum of ambiguity, vagueness, and concurrence, at times, able to blurr gender connotations. Textiles and ceramics offer a platform for examining global trade dynamics and reconsidering colonial legacies, including our relationship with nature and human production. Themes such as feminism, corporeality, and gender roles are present in ceramics and textiles, reflecting the depth and versatility of these media in being equipped to address contemporary issues. Even the Internet and programming are systems that can be understood as a 'fabric'.
Following the avant-garde of the early 20th century, contemporary artists began appropriating traditional techniques such as embroidery, stitching, knotting, weaving, and pottery making, subverting existing disciplinary and material boundaries. While textiles are associated with warmth and flexibility, ceramics formed from soft clay radiate a cool fragility. Yet both media bring to life an aesthetic language that shifts between hard, soft, unwieldy, and flowing. Their time-based and corporeal qualities connect with historical and cultural antecedents, producing transformations in affect and meaning that suggest innovative social coexistence and interaction models. These models challenge conventional expectations regarding the sadly still existing hierarchical relationship between art and craft, the uses and/or combinations of artistic media, habitual markers for gender, class, and ethnicity, and becoming models of political art.