On the occasion of Veil Craft, Materials & Applications with Craft Contemporary presents a conversation between practitioners across art and architecture on the topic of textiles and fibers. Veil Craft draws upon the materiality of a city under constant construction, transforming the debris netting that adorns building sites into a meditative pocket park that gestures toward cultures of maintenance, histories of gendered labor, and the presentation of the body. Threads convenes a community formed through practices committed to woven, soft, tactile material to explore connections between and beyond.
PARTICIPANTS
Ahree Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist working in video, new media, and textiles. Lee received her BA from Yale University in English literature and a MFA in graphic design from Yale School of Art. Her commissions include the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the 01SJ Biennial, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and the Sundance Channel. Her honors include an artist residency at Santa Fe Art Institute and a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award nomination, and her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Metropolis, and Fast Company.
Casey Baden is a multidisciplinary artist working with textiles, text, natural dye, sun-lit photographic exposures, painting, weaving, clay, and installation. Born and raised in Houston, TX, she completed her BFA at New York University, 2014, and her MFA at California Institute of the Arts, 2020. Combing craft (the handmade, embodied knowledge, enduring labor) with figuration, intimate personal experience, and the domestic, Baden attempts to foster the critical space of emotion and create opportunities for immersion and embodiment. Presently she is the co-founder of an artist-run space and arts fabrication project called Full Service Creative and the co-founder of an up-and-coming fiber resource center, Textile Resource LA.
Current Interests is a Los Angeles-based architectural design studio founded by Matthew Au and Mira Henry. As a creative collaboration, Current Interests’ built work is grounded in notions of material specificity, color relationships, assembly details, and an engagement in critical cultural thinking. Matthew and Mira are design faculty at Southern California Institute for Architecture and have visiting faculty appointments at Princeton University and Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Felecia Davis’ work in computational textiles questions how we live as she re-imagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture. Computational textiles are textiles that respond to cues in the environment or use the changeable properties of the material itself to communicate information, thereby transforming how we communicate, socialize, and use space. Davis is interested in developing computational methods and designs in relation to specific bodies in specific places, engaging specific social, cultural, and political constructions.
Figure is a San Francisco-based architecture collective led by James Leng and Jennifer Ly, RA. Their work explores relationships between art, architecture, and community. Their current interests include unexpected materials, dollhouses, and rocks. James and Jennifer received their architectural education from Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of California, Berkeley. They have received numerous fellowships and awards, and have been published in The Architectural Review, Log, and CLOG, among others. They are also lecturers at UC Berkeley.
Minga Opazo is a fourth-generation textile crafter who explores the relationship between climate change, contemporary textile production, and Chilean textile history and design. Born in Chile, Minga immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of 16. She completed her BFA at University of California, Berkeley in 2016 and her MFA at California Institute of the Arts, 2020. Opazo has exhibited works internationally including at the Museum of Visual Art, Santiago, Chile, CAM Gallery, ACRE, the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and CalArts. She has been awarded various residencies including at the Banff Centre, ACRE, Haystack Mountain School of Craft, The REEF, Anderson Ranch Art Center, and MASS MoCA. She recently had her work published in Artforum and Lumzine.