Craft Contemporary Winter Exhibition 2023 / Alicia Piller: Within & Strings of Desire Group Show

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I photographed Craft Contemporary’s Winter exhibition opening, which included Alicia Piller’s Within & the Strings of Desire group show this past January.

Alicia Piller’s Within is an installation of multimedia works that investigates the relationship between macro and micro perspectives of knowledges, meaning, and bodily form. Piller uses resin, latex, xeroxed imagery, dried plants, stones, and found objects to create cosmic and biological landscapes that are an invitation for viewers to visually connect abstracted form with the complexities of human experience. The artist pulls apart and reconfigures mundane materials into a rich and deep form of visual storytelling that bridges time and place, reminding us that internally and externally we are part of fantastical worlds shaped by necessity, emotion, and wisdom.

This exhibition is supported in part by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and the Bernard Kester Trust in Memory of Edith Wyle.

Read more about Piller and how she developed her work for the exhibition in this interview.

Strings of Desire is united by themes of human desire and longing, this group of thirteen artists have chosen to work with embroidery either as a singular medium or as a part of a multimedia art practice. The assembled artists have embraced needle and embroidery floss to connect with and integrate their non-Western cultural heritages, their queer identities, and their fantasies. Strings of Desire sets forth artists who have created a hybrid aesthetic that conflates embroidery, painting, sculpture, and architecture to explore personal identities that, like their art forms, are not solitary. Often either self-taught or gained through matrilineal knowledge, embroidery is a practice that is personal at its core, allowing the artists to explore different aspects of themselves in relation to larger aesthetic concepts, such as the hand and technology, childhood memories and adulthood, and lived and projected visions of their hearts’ desires.

Exhibition artists: Diem Chau, Jenny Hart, Kang Seung Lee, Aubrey Longley-Cook, Carmen Mardónez, Erick Medel, Ken Gun Min, Sophia Narrett, Jordan Nassar, Miguel Osuna, Ardeshir Tabrizi, Chiffon Thomas, 25 Million Stitches/Jennifer Kim Sohn.

This exhibition is supported in part by the Antonia and Vladimer Kulaev Cultural Heritage Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and the Bernard Kester Trust in Memory of Edith Wyle.

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