This exhibition brings together the work of two artists who explore landscapes of labor, culture, and identity.
Chandra’s work often utilizes discarded materials and vibrant color to craft intertwined personal and historical narratives. Through her drawing, painting, and collage, she pays homage to a history of mark-making and the contributions of people of color, particularly Black and Latino communities, to American life. Her work connects often nonlinear histories, igniting memories and reimagining cultural landscapes, literal and figurative.
Ceci repurposes security envelopes, transforming the ‘protective’ patterns designed to shield sensitive information into intricate vistas reflecting landscapes of real and imagined natural world(s). Through collage, her textile-like works evoke animated maps, shaped by issues of privacy, possession, control, and identity.
Both artists inspire a close-looking of patterns - visual, social, historical, contemporary - as powerful expressions of cultural themes. Their work invites us to reconsider the meanings behind everyday objects and landscapes, and to reflect on broader narratives of identity, history, and personal experience.
I am terrified of a blank surface. I have always been an inveterate collector of things both bought and found. When I began making things in my 20s, collage and assemblage were the most natural way to evade my fear of the blank page and activate my growing collections. Over the years, my work has variously used antique watches and photographs, vintage paper ephemera, old wooden boxes and frames, and fruit stickers and paint chips.
In the past few years, my materials and ideas have become focused around my daily interactions with packaging that comes into the home. Tiny boxes, toothpaste boxes, shipping boxes brilliantly engineered to attract, stack, display, ship, and be thrown away to make room for more. Paper, plastic, net, and cardboard containers that hold our daily food, essential and not-so- essential health products, and our electronics until we use and dispose of them.
As I gather materials, imagine their potential, and deconstruct and reconstruct them, I think about the industrial designers who invented them, the factory workers who manifested them, the carriers who delivered them, and why I need the products in the first place. I continually resist the temptation to make merely aesthetic arrangements, instead allowing the pieces to create a logical rearrangement that references, yet defies, their original purpose.
As equal parts collector, maker, and educator, I am pleased to have the opportunity to share some of my working materials and oFer select cardboard bits for visitors to compose into their own ephemeral collages. I hope you enjoy exploring the materiality, beauty, and intricacies of cardboard design as much as I do!