Converging Lines at Volume Gallery

January 29 '16

Converging Lines offers new works by Aguiñiga, Jaworska and Matson which are the result of each designer challenging, amplifying and emphasizing the traditional contextual mediums within which they work.

Christy Matson is a fiber artist whose jacquard woven work can often be ‘read’ as brushstrokes, nuanced in palate and structure. The watercolor works by Matson in Converging Lines are simultaneously studies for weavings and complete expressions. In these pieces that same palate and structure is evident, effectively guiding Matson effortlessly from one medium to another while emphasizing the materiality of each.

Three extractions from Ania Jaworska’s suite titled A Subjective Catalog of Columns explore the history of architecture and challenge our perceptions of the built environment. In Catalog, she isolates the columns from a building’s structure, thus removing the context and enabling the images to immediately take on a decorative and graphic tone. By examining the re-contextualized image, the impactful nature of the column’s simultaneous role as art and architecture – both structural and beautiful – can be fully appreciated.

Tanya Aguiñiga specializes in woven fiber work, hovering between art and design, communicating through the conceptual and physical. Reveling in their liminal qualities, her practice belongs to both worlds. A well-versed maker and designer, steeped in Mexican and American cultures, her bilingual aesthetics and means of making blend and emphasize traditions specific to each. Aguiñiga’s Knot series are bold colorful massive knotted ropes. Exaggerated in color and scale, and born of the desire to explore the nature of dyes and create a burst of rope, Knots 1, 2, and 3 reveal surprising and remarkable personalities.

Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles based furniture designer and artist who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design, and is a current faculty member at Otis College of Art and Design. She created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists’ group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. She recently founded the group, Artists Helping Artisans, through which she helps spread knowledge of craft by collaborating with traditional artisans. Her work has been exhibited from Mexico City to Milan and she was named a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts.

Ania Jaworska is an architect and educator. She currently teaches art, design, and architecture courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds a master's degree in architecture from the Cracow University of Technology in Poland as well as the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Her practice focuses on exploring the connection between art and architecture and her work explores bold simple forms, humor, commentary and conceptual, historic, and cultural references. Jaworska’s work was presented as part of 13178 Moran Street: Grounds for Detroit in Common Ground, the 13th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (2012) and CHGO DSGN exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center (2014). She recently completed a design for the bookstore at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago, which is currently on view. She has a solo show BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Ania Jaworska Aug 25, 2015–Jan 31, 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Christy Matson is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Matson's work has been included in recent exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Arts Houston, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Knoxville Museum of Art, the Asheville Museum of Art, and The San Francisco Museum of Craft+Design. Her work is in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Ameican Art’s Renwick Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland, OR. Matson currently teaches in the Art Department at Cal State University Long Beach.

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