TANYA AGUIÑIGA'S WEAVING AT SHULAMIT NAZARIAN

Aguiñiga’s practice is heavily influenced by the traditional crafts of Mexico and pre-Columbian Latin America. Using off-loom weaving techniques, as well as knots, knitting, and crochet, Aguiñiga creates elaborate networks of braided thread, some of which are dyed with a terracotta slurry that hardens like a rigid skin on the surface of the rope. The textiles are arranged in cascading forms that resemble the detritus that accumulates along the banks of the Los Angeles River. Many of the works, in fact, carry stones and sculpted objects, including terracotta hands and organs, among the warp and weft of its weave, a symbolic “catch” that relates the process of weaving to the physical sustenance provided by fishing. The elemental needs of food, clothing, and shelter thus become entry points for thinking about the kinds of practice that might aim at providing a concomitant spiritual nourishment.

Aguiñiga thinks of her works as portraits, representations of the body that capture its tenuous —and often timorous— contact with the world around it. For Aguiñiga, this body is not singular but made up of the familial bonds and informal relationships that extend out from the individual and form a community around their person.

Throughout her practice, Aguiñiga has looked to the history of migration between the United States and Mexico as a way of exploring the mutual dependence of people and the transit of labor and goods across borders. Aguiñiga’s newest textiles draw on the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers as major waterways connected to industry and labor that also exist as sites of leisure and recreation, small pockets of nature within the urban expanse. For Aguiñiga these rivers became places that recorded the life of the city, and she began to see them not only as sources for the work but as creative practitioners in their own right—potential collaborators skilled in combining materials and eking out the relationship between seemingly disparate objects.

Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles-based artist/designer/craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. In her formative years, she created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists’ group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture, and gender while creating community.

Telar Terrenal / Earthly Room. Exhibition by Tanya Aguiñiga.

Until February 6^th, 2024.

Shulamit Nazarian. 616 N La Brea Ave. Los Angeles, United States.