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Featuring: Tabitha Arnold

Curated by: Tess Wei

View exhibition catalog here

Workshop of the World, was the first major solo exhibition of works by Chattanooga-based artist Tabitha Arnold. Curated by Exhibitions Manager & Associate Curator Tess Wei, this exhibition took place at the List Gallery, Swarthmore College in January—February, 2024

Arnold’s tapestries and works on paper are inspired by contemporary labor movements, as well as her own experiences as a worker, socialist organizer, and artist coming of age during a wave of unionization efforts in the United States. She utilizes a self-taught method of punch-needle embroidery to create medium and large-scale tapestries that draw inspiration from a range of art historical traditions, including Eastern Orthodox icons, Mexican mural paintings, Gee's Bend quilts, and Afghan war rugs.

To learn more about Tabitha Arnold's work, visit https://tabithaarnold.com

Featuring: Melissa Joseph

Curated by: Tess Wei

View exhibition catalog here

Conflicting Truths: Works by Melissa Joseph was the first and most extensive solo exhibition exhibition of works by NYC-based artist Melissa Joseph. Curated by Exhibitions Manager & Associate Curator Tess Wei, this exhibition brought together numerous wall-mounted and sculptural forms that prioritize intimacy in scale, irregular edges, and softness of image. Mining her family’s photographic archive as the starting point for her subjects and scenes, Joseph translates these family snapshots through a range of processes, including: altering textiles through wet- and needle-felting, combining stoneware through inlaying, and forming delicate, linen surfaces through paper-making. What unites all of these processes is the use of friction and pressure to transform highly malleable materials into relatively taut forms: repetitively rubbing strands of wool in a soap-and-water mixture to interlace the fibers; flattening clay bodies of differing colors with a rolling pin to create continuous ceramic surfaces; and pouring and dripping linen pulp onto a screen to form an integrated sheet of paper.

Raised in rural Pennsylvania by her father, a surgeon who emigrated from Kerala, India, and her American mother, the artist’s multicultural background is an integral theme throughout her practice. In basing her subjects and settings on family photographs, some works feature her late father and other relatives of Malayali heritage living in India, while other pieces include various maternal family members and moments from Joseph's own childhood. Through material translations of this personal archive, Joseph forms a new architecture of interpretation wherein her visual language oscillates between soft and firm, natural and industrial, remembered and imagined. In shifting between these materials, methods, and influences, the works in Conflicting Truths articulated Joseph's own family history, while offering space to more broadly consider how identity is formed and reformed by fluctuating relationships to space, memory, and ideas of belonging. 

To learn more about Melissa Joseph's work, visit https://www.melissajoseph.net/

Facilitated by: Tess Wei

at Icebox Project Space, Invited: take care of the square footage

idle hands is a project about, for, and made from rest. For this iteration at Icebox Project Space, the public is invited to collectively create through the radical act of stillness. Visitors are offered a seat and a table on which to place their hands for as long as their own time allows. Here, you, we, us create idle hands by taking time to be intentionally unproductive members of society.

This project considers the saying “idle hands are the devil’s playground,” which warns against the inherent risks of idleness wherein boredom inevitably leads to devious actions. Bringing this into our cult of capitalism, the dogma has developed further meaning: to be good people we should always be productive. Our hands must always be occupied to generate value… just to give it away! But not here!

idle hands offers space to rest without guilt. Here, we direct our devotion away from production and value that is dislodged from us. There is no standardized expectation for participation and sometimes the piece may not exist when no one can rest — that is ok. The matter is our own rest, together. Throughout the course of this collective effort, interval-timed photographs will create a public archive to honor those who partake. 

All we need is to meet at the table and slow down. We create when we rest!

Curated by: Tess Wei

Featuring: Connie Yu, Lucia Garzón,  Mo Fernanda Nuñez, FORTUNE, Nickie Sigurdsson, Kristina Stallvik, Serena Hocharoen

This exhibition highlights the intersection of makers who engage with cooking and food as sites of cultural production and preservation. Of particular focus, is the way in which these visual and culinary artists engage with printed, digital, and alternative formats to represent processes, recipes, menus, and meals shared.

Food (here broadly, edible matter intended for nourishment, community-making, and storytelling) participates in a constant process of transformation from planting and harvesting to preparing and eating. Therefore, the ways in which edible matter and its related rituals are documented, shared, and (re)interpreted become essential appendages to food, whose physical form is otherwise ephemeral. Through processes ranging from risograph printing to the gradual rehydration of silk handkerchiefs, a thing shared offers snow fungus (Tremella fuciformis), natural remedies, porski (cod), garlic shells, and more.

The works presented in this exhibition have differing intentions, existing as: archives for personal and communal memories; prompts for others to engage in similar creative acts (in the way recipes are more step-by-step suggestions than instruction manuals); invitations to congregate at the table, so to speak; and bodies of research to sustain traditions of food growing, preparing, and partaking.

Featuring: Karyn Olivier

Curated by: Andrea Packard and Tess Wei

View exhibition catalog here

Seep was a solo exhibition of mixed media works by the preeminent artist Karyn Olivier. This exhibition was co-curated by Andrea Packard and Tess Wei. The exhibition, accompanying catalog, and related events were funded by a generous grant from the William J. Cooper Foundation.

For nearly twenty years, Karyn Olivier has been creating sculptures, installations, and photographs that transform familiar objects and public spaces. She often repurposes materials from the waste stream such as fence posts, buoys, used clothing, playground slides, and roofing materials. Her artworks engage viewers with a range of issues, including the plight of international refugees, the legacy of slavery, the role of public monuments, and unsustainable construction practices. Through engaging with history, contemporary events, and architectural contexts and by deftly transforming everyday materials, Olivier creates works that are poignant, thought-provoking, and at times, whimsical.

To learn more about Karyn Olivier's work, visit https://www.karynolivier.com/