Traywick Contemporary is pleased to announce Siblings of the Sun: an exhibition of new textiles, collage and sculpture by Chicago based artist, Diana Guerrero-Maciá.
Diana Guerrero-Maciá is known for her textile-based work that explores new relationships between diverse practices ranging from collage, appropriation and pop-culture sampling to painting, quilt making and sculpture. While her bold compositions often reference the formal legacies of Modernism and Suprematism, her borrowed imagery of graphic icons—signal flags, targets, faces—reference everyday cultural expression. It is Guerrero-Maciá's purposeful, handmade processes and distinct choice of materials that deliberately blur the boundaries between the contemporary and the traditional, between craft and fine art and between message and medium.
"Diana Guerrero-Maciá's fabric collages are simultaneously nostalgic for, and reminiscent of, radical artistic activities throughout the twentieth century, ranging from manifesto writing and Russian Suprematism to guitar smashing and punk rock." –Jenni Sorkin, art critic and Assistant Professor, University of California at Santa Barbara
The title of the exhibition, Siblings of the Sun, was inspired by scientific theory around the existence of other stars and planets in the galaxy that were potentially born from our sun. Guerrero-Maciá's work often embodies similar idea of group identity or tribalism, in tandem with a nod to rebellion and "us vs. them" oppositions. This series includes fifty textile and paper-based works and three large sculptural installations, all of which use a common visual vocabulary and similar materials that at once embrace and defy one another. The sculptural installations contain repurposed and non-functional objects, which are displayed in conversation (or confrontation) with larger textile pieces. Intrigued by the possibility of a found object being a catalyst for an idea, the artist repurposes cedar house posts and steel beams to create sculptures with implied functions—a window for reframing how we look, a gate to fence or define a particular space, or a soapbox on which to stand.
Diana Guerrero-Maciá earned a BFA from Villanova University in 1988 before earning a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1992. Since 2001, she has served as an Associate Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited extensively at public institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; Three Walls, Chicago, IL; Elmhurst Museum, IL and the Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis, IL. Guerrero-Maciá is also a recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. This is her second solo exhibition with Traywick Contemporary.