NEW YORK, NY.- The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, an ancient mother tongue that spawned a wide swath of languages from Gaelic to Greek to Hindi, contained a root word *teks-, meaning “to weave” or ”to fabricate”. The Latin verb texere is the etymological root of “textile, and “text”. In Greek, “Tekhne” Means “art,” “craft,” “skill, and in English it becomes a root of words like “architect” and “technology”, suggesting the deep cultural relationship between the creation of fabrics, applied sciences, and the evolution of ideas. Roland Barthes, in his work Mythologies correlated the development of textiles and the creation of myths. He argued that while a woven fabric has a literal foundation as an object, it is also imbued with an additional layer of meaning that ties the material to an abstract concept. In Greek mythology, the three Fates create human life by spinning, allotting, and cutting a thread—connecting artistic creation to god-like powers. This show brings together works that refer to mythological frameworks as emerging from their material correlaries.
Travis Boyer is a painter with a deep knowledge of fibers and textiles, which informs both the materials and methods of his practice. His paintings are made by applying layers of dye to velvet, a complex substrate that can absorb pigment on both its front and back surfaces, as well as along the individual directional fibers of the fabric itself. This process allows Boyer to build images across multiple spatial planes, producing surfaces that shift in appearance as the viewer moves around them and emphasizing the tactile qualities of the work. In his newest paintings, depictions of butchered meat create a striking dissonance between the seductive sheen of the velvet surface and the raw, visceral imagery it contains.
Alex Dodge makes works inspired by human interactions with computing, popular culture, and societal advancement. His painting borrows a process from the Japanese fabric-dying technique of katozome, in which a wax resist is applied through thick stencils by hand. Using oil paint, Dodge brings this traditional technique into the present day with advanced digitally developed imagery laser-cut into detailed stencils and developed in layers on his canvases. The resulting images have a cake frosting-like desirability that belies the ominous undertones of the characters he depicts.
In her tapestry works, Tamara Gonzales collaborates with Peruvian weavers whose visual traditions run parallel with the spiritual experiences that inform her practice. Many of Gonzales’s images originate in visionary experiences associated with plant medicine ceremonies, as well as in her daily drawing practice. She first develops this imagery through painting and drawing, then works with Shipibo weavers in the towns of Pisac and Ayacucho to translate these compositions into alpaca wool tapestries using traditional weaving and embroidery techniques.
Chris Lloyd collapses religious imagery from a variety of cultures through a collage aesthetic using multiple processes from ink transfer to hand drawing to a vinyl-cutter loaded with a ballpoint pen. He combines sacred and profane iconography and ornament from world religions with black metal and punk symbols, and often distorted through the transfer or drawing techniques. As all the imagery is ultimately sourced from digital archives, it becomes contextually flattened as translated into his work, invoking new and hybridized mythologies.
Soheila Kayoud creates embroidered works that are spun from her personal interpretations of Persian mythological creatures, and specifically the div, a demon-like being that takes on many forms. Her hand-crafted works transform the grotesque figures into softer, gentle forms that suggest a more complex and humane vision of the “other”. Through her re-interpretations, she develops her allegorical storytelling made accessible through her exquisite embroidery.
Jessica Rankin‘s works evoke cosmologies through a synthesis of painting and stitching on linen, often incorporating poetic texts that connect her process to narratives of creation and origin. Drawing on sources ranging from the Babylonian epic Enūma Eliš to Milton’s Paradise Lost, Rankin creates compositions that function simultaneously as imaginative maps and cosmological diagrams, weaving together personal memory, language, and myth. The resulting works suggest cycles of creation, destruction, and renewal – archetypal patterns through which cultures have long situated human experience within the vastness of the cosmos.
