July 30, 2024 - July 1, 2024, classic-editor, classic-editor
ATA Window Gallery presents: Exoskeleton: You Cannot Return to the Dirt
July 1- 30, 2024
“Exoskeleton” explores through the medium of textile art the complexity of holding nostalgia for a time that holds much pain; to lay bare the feeling of growing up queer and disabled, in a body that has never been yours. Like freshly shed skin, I expose the complexities of false memories and the never ending need to change, to escape. I mix textile collage of fabrics from clothing owned by family members, owned by me, things I can never put on my body again because of the weight of the thing I experienced seeped in that cloth. I combine this with beadwork and embroidery to outline the cocoon of memories, such as lovingly stitching my childhood room’s wall paper, or hand beading the emotions of memories. I meld my mind and body, the feel of a cicada nymph’s too tight exoskeleton that must be shed to move on. I try to express the feelings of crawling from the dirt that you knew as home to grow and change into something new, something you must be. A struggling attempt to reclaim my mind and body as my own, to break from my past, to be new like a fresh cicada in the morning dew. Through a colorful explosion I share the notion that pain is not always best expressed by darkness, but rather with the bright color of a child’s memory.
Z. Fondanarosa