Material Girl(s)

March 12, 2021 to April 2, 2021

Exhibition By Victoria Gonzales and Beronica Gonzales

The exhibition explores two sides of a singular shared experience of childhood and how that experience is translated into adulthood and made visible through a comparison of two bodies of work. This exhibition seeks to investigate themes of perception, memory and material sensibilities and their connection to home and familial relations. The works combine fiber arts and painting to examine how we perceive and interact with the world around us. Memory presents itself as a means to contemplate the past and guide the present through the manipulation of fiber and paint and their attachment to past and present. While fiber is embedded with symbols of comfort, home and tradition, paint is tied to immediacy and control. Additionally, both materials can enhance or diminish tactility as a means to connect memory, space, and objects. The combination of the two are presented as a vehicle to navigate a world view. 

Victoria Gonzales's work uses abstraction to reference objects and space in large oil paintings and small intimate fiber works. The oil paintings explore the materiality of paint and the manipulation of its tactile quality. They feature thick heavily applied texture and bold flat passages of color to push and pull both space and paint. The small fiber works expand her language of mark making and interest in tactility on a smaller scale to embellish singular marks within space with machine embroidered sewing. Thread and paint are used as means to explore texture and mark making's connection to an automatic physical function. Beronica Gonzales's work explores themes of self representation, focusing on moments, objects, and environments which elicit visceral personal connections and embodying them in a way which manifests her complicated relationships with what they depict. Part of this connection is communicated through material choice and the inherent implications of fibers and paint. 

Both artist have also created an immersive installation that will recreate their childhood rooms. It highlights shared versus individual identity and artistic methodologies through the creation of a physical space directly referencing a connection to history and memory. The installation will use architecture to alter psychological meaning beyond the reality of the space as it existed. The inclusion of objects will further explore a psychological connection to the space to indicate repressed or altered memory within the confines of the basic architectural design of the rooms. Fiber arts techniques were used including, tufting, quilting, embroidery, and basic sewing to construct the walls, ground plane, and contents of the room. The pairing of our individual works and collaborative exhibition within the same space invites the viewer to make connections to corresponding material sensibilities and points of divergence and the relation to a shared past.