April 23, 2016 — June 26, 2016 | Art League Gallery
Reception: May 6, 2016 | 5:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Diana Guerrero-Maciá will participate in a roundtable discussion with artists Krista Hoefle, Joe Meiser and SBMA Curator, Mark Rospenda | 6:30 p.m.
Slow Blossoming (Minding the Gap)
Where Medieval meets Modern, the gendering of materials and making collapse.
Referencing both pictorial symbolic elements of Flemish Mille-Fleur tapestries and the structural forms of Modernist art & design, I support how handcrafts’ revolutionary past continues to have a radical future. This installation is my attempt to reframe how the material making & displays of textiles, painting, and design can illuminate the inequalities of gender still present today. All the world, is all of us.
I expect the bleach (the job of the sun) to slowly punch holes in the night-sky
Here the sculptures echo the decimal-based forms of Cuisenaire Rods, a modern tool to teach children basic math and fittingly, a reference to the iconic American quilt patterns of Log Cabin & Basic Patch. The rational objects support and contrast to the psychedelic textiles. Embedded in the hand-stitched textiles are Signs – pointing to, in no particular order – Numerical Statistics of current Gender Pay-Gap discrepancies, Sentient Creatures, All-Seeing Eyes, Symbols of Dissent & Assent, Embedded Woodland Animals, The Hunt, Amusements, Alchemic Star Charts, and Signifiers of the Self.
Each sign is a year – How long must we wait?
In observation of this spectacle, is a chorus, faces cut from Belgian portrait linen – the linen that held-up ten-thousand painted faces – spectrally dyed a light-absorbing black. Come red, come yellow, come blue {the Dutch would like this.} This is a triad after-all, a third space we must build.
A Greek Chorus – a collective voice, reveals what it sees
Diana Guerrero-Maciá
Diana Guerrero-Maciá is a multi-disciplinary artist. She works within the expanded fields of painting, textiles & design and believes craft is a way of thinking. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, created several public art commissions, received multiple grants and residencies including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and two fellowships at the MacDowell Colony. Guerrero-Maciá studied and was awarded fellowships at both Skowhegan School of Art and Penland School of Craft. She holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and BFA from Villanova University. She is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son who both love riding bicycles with her.
image: Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Slow Blossoming, 2016 Installation detail.
Photo credit: Clare Britt
