Tightly Knit, Loose Fit
Ortega y Gasset Projects, New York, USA

Blue and Silver, oil on board, 35 x 22cm, 2020-21

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Press Release and Gallery Text

Tightly Knit, Loose Fit
The Dynamics of Praxis
Tightly Knit, Loose Fit is an exhibition exploring the dynamics of language and artmaking as interconnected aspects of praxis. The original term of praxis, as coined by Paulo Freire, describes the perpetual process of making and then making meaning. Its concept is fundamental to the mission of the Artist Praxis podcast, founded by the curators Debora Faccion Grodzki and Sarah Arriagada, and central to the conversations they conducted there with each of the exhibiting artists. The conversations gathered in the Artist Praxis podcast explore everything artists work with, from materials to thoughts, from dreams to gestures, from feelings to tools. The exhibition title, Tightly Knit, Loose Fit, alludes to the process of stringing, piecing, or weaving together thoughts, practices, and materials into cohesive entities, much like the exhibited artworks and published interviews are woven into this public exhibition.

Tightly Knit, Loose Fit includes 38 artists from diverse backgrounds and artistic practices. Adding to the multicultural, multilingual, and multipersonal conversations in the podcast, the exhibition honors the sovereignty of human creativity by bringing together artworks that show the gaps and pitfalls of language as well as the pauses and discordances in artistic practices. Though based in the United States, Brazil, Cambodia, Germany, Scotland, England, and France, a majority of the exhibiting artists have their immediate roots elsewhere: in Russia, China, Ireland, Serbia, Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Turkiye, Vietnam, Slovakia, Ukraine, the African diaspora, and the First Nations of these lands. Within this dense multicultural, multilingual, and multipersonal fabric, Tightly Knit, Loose Fit honors the sovereignty of the space in between the embodied and the materialized.

With the option to use the podcast interviews with individual artists as audio guides, exhibition visitors become participants in the unfolding of praxis. This multisensory experience shines a light not only on the works on display, but also on what it means to make art today, and on the human dynamics involved in making sense of creativity as a global community. The exhibition will take place at Ortega y_ Gasset Projects, an artist-run non­ profit gallery in New York City, from August 12 to 27, 2023.

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In 2021, I was interviewed by artists and curators Debora Faccion Grodzki and Sarah Arriagada for the Artist Praxis Podcast.

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In this podcast I was interviewed about my painting practice, studio routines and ways of working. Tightly Knit, Loose Fit is an exhibition which was developed by Grodzki and Arriagada, utilizing selected works which were discussed on their audio platform. By bringing together these contemporary works, by a diverse range of artists, an interesting suite of ideas was showcased. Although the painting Blue and Silver did not necessarily share visual similarities with other works in the exhibition, it was the idea of slow looking, of materiality and the ideas of seeing beauty and interest in the smallest of details which came to the fore as a linking thread.

Exhibiting in Tightly Knit, Loose Fit was an opportunity which allowed for new narratives to form, which related to the ways that contemporary visual practices can draw attention to surfaces within periods of slow, and meditative looking.

Revisiting this work also meant that I was forced to re-examine the ideas I was working with in 2021 – looking back to issues of weaving, of surface texture and of repeated processes within painting.