Ariana Faye
Allensworth

Past Presence:
Indira Allegra & Christopher R. Martin

ROLE

Curator


YEAR2017

An exhibition exploring Black grief and collective memory through the material language of weaving.

AAs a 2x2 curator-in-residence at ProArts Gallery, I organized Past Presence, an exhibition featuring  new and recent work by Bay Area artists Indira Allegra and Christopher R. Martin. The exhibition responds to politicized trauma in Black contemporary life through the medium of weaving, both literal and figurative.  
Allegra presented an iteration of Open Casket, an immersive digital weaving installation that combines abstract compositions with cacophonous audio recordings of grief-stricken families who have lost loved ones to police violence. Within Open Casket, Allegra explores the structure of crepe, a textile historically associated with mourning and commonly used to line the interior of caskets. Both visceral and mournful, Open Casket is a reflection on digital mourning, the potential of digital mourning cloths and the materiality of Black sadness and Black life.

Martin exhibited a series of large scale tapestries depicting objects and symbols of state violence, slave labor, and resistance stitched into cotton-based textiles. With visual language reminiscent of activist banners, his work draws on the legacy of cotton in the American South and fiber-working techniques passed down from his mother, a seamstress.

Past Presence explores the capacity of fiber and weaving to stand-in for the body and carry the weight of collective grief. By using overt visual tools, Allegra and Martin interroage the psychic and material toll of racial violence and open space for mourning, memory, and embodied witnessing.
FIG.¹












FIG.¹
LEFT: STILL FROM OPEN CASKET BY INDIRA ALLEGRA, RIGHT: CHEAT THE GALLOWS TEXTILE BANNER BY CHRISTOPHER R. MARTIN
RELEVANT LINKS

¹EXHIBITION READING & RESOURCE LIST
²PRESS RELEASE
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