Press Room

Monika Zarzeczna | Mixed-Media Sculpture and Installation
Tuesday

Monika Zarzeczna's sculptures stem from an exploration of objects, forms, and their perceived purpose, asking deeper questions regarding the intent and history of an object. Zarzeczna assembles and preserves collected materials, colors, and found objects to create work that evokes nostalgia and reflection along with a simultaneous sense of nature and urban decay. Her work depicts notions of transition—of objects having lost their original function due to time, damage, or gradual obsolescence—exploring the in-betweenness that occurs when one moves from a known to an unknown situation or place, and attempting to visualize misunderstandings of systems, the adaptations required, and the ideas born from that chaos.

A recurring strategy in Zarzeczna's work is to incorporate found objects and their lingering individual language such that they coexist with forms created by hand. At MAD, she will continue her series "Them," made with air-drying clay, paper and muslin, gouache, and acrylic paint alongside found and pre-used elements.

Lily Moebes | Textiles
Wednesday

Lily Moebes seeks to map the politics of dissociation, especially as it diminishes agency in the traumatized body. She explores the politics of details and their erasure, with a focus on the body, the family, and the public sphere. Erasure being inherently violent, she engages details as a practice of resistance. Theater, psychoanalysis, and social theory inform her multimedia practice, which includes textile arts, printmaking, and sculpture.

At MAD, Moebes will continue her project "The Gatekeepers," a series of ten larger-than-life figures rendered in embroidery and quilting. Each figure will live in a rectangular frame, the size of a large door, outlined with architectural details that suggest the interior of a home. The Gatekeepers are idealized protectors, agents of the domestic sphere that watch over families and intervene in situations of abuse. They enforce boundaries, they lash out against violation. The project is not just a material study, but also a multidisciplinary inquiry into what it means to be an advocate.

Elodie Blanchard | Textiles
Thursday

In her artistic practice, textile designer Elodie Blanchard makes use of the textile waste that inevitably accumulates during the process of designing fabric and creating fiber installations. For her series "Growing Out of Scraps," she constructs playful "tree" sculptures out of Poly-Fil, metal rods, concrete, and fabric, and sews embroidered textile scraps to create large collage wall hangings inspired by fauna or flora. Taken together, these elements comprise an enchanted landscape of nonsense, an alternative universe made of all the stuff not needed in our society of overconsumption. Blanchard's interest lies in spotting discarded objects and transforming them into something whole and beautiful.

At MAD, she will expand her "Growing Out of Scraps" project, creating a wonderland in which her tree sculptures and wall hangings coexist. The landscape will incorporate costumes and masks, drawing on her roots in fashion and performance art.

Jesse Harrod | Mixed-Media Sculpture
Friday

Jesse Harrod manipulates and transforms materials to animate their sexual and sensual qualities and explore the intersections between queer kinship, support, and sexuality. In her sculptural installations, she works with rope as a pliable element that she regards much like a drawing tool, utilizing knot-making techniques such as macrame in ways that can be understood as simultaneously restraining and supporting. She is interested in the doubleness of rope as an element used within queer sexual play and as a material that conveys how bodies rely upon and support one another.

At MAD, Harrod will create a series of works that investigate the relationship between color and gender identity. While color has always played an active role in her sculptural practice, in these new works she aims to utilize color as a conceptual tool to explore how physical form, and forms of gendered embodiment, are made and remade through perception.

Damien Davis | Mixed-Media Sculpture
Saturday

Damien Davis' practice explores historical representations of blackness by seeking to unpack the visual language of cultures both domestic and abroad, questioning how cultures code and decode representations of race through craft, design, and digital modes of production. His work is rooted in an ongoing project to establish a growing visual lexicon made out of a discrete iconography. Ultimately, he is developing a personal language of discourse by amassing, curating, and strategically deploying individual icons into various assemblages and objects.

At MAD, Davis will continue to grow a new body of work focused on waiting rooms in children's hospitals, which exist as a site for both nostalgia and trauma. This series will begin to unpack the complicated dynamics of families with sick children, and examine the US medical establishment's long legacy of discriminating against and exploiting black Americans, the indelible memory of which remains deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of the community.

Victoria Manganiello | Textile Installation
Sunday

Exploring the intersections between materiality, space, philosophy, and storytelling, Victoria Manganiello makes installations, abstract paintings, and performances with hand-woven textiles, using hand-spun yarn and hand-mixed natural and synthetic dyes. These labor-intensive and monotonous processes subliminally act as connectors to all cultures, current and past, that have uniquely yet simultaneously developed textile techniques across space.

At MAD, Manganiello will use tubing as weft to pump dye through her textiles. Small computers program the color's movement through the tubing, causing the cloth's surface to become a display with moving patterns. The project transforms a familiar material into a surprising technology, and utilizes this functionality to tell a story about the social benefits and detriments of computers.