Opening Reception: Friday, February 3 from 6pm to 8pm
“I Took My Water With Me” – Rwanda, 2022, Hand-embroidered miniature mattress, 8.7 x 10.6 in. Photo by Saad DabbousYasmine Dabbous
If You Leave Under Fire, What Would You Take with You?
Amputated from their former lives, refugees find themselves—to borrow from Albert Camus—diverted from their selfness. They leave the territories of their ancestors, in hope to find safety in new and unknown destinations. On these assiduous journeys, they cling to material objects they carry with them all the way from home.
These foundation objects acquire a practical and conceptual importance larger than life. They promote survival and livelihood. They defy loss to preserve the refugee’s identity as well as their humanity. Remnants of a former reality, objects create critical connections between past and future, in an elusive present.
In this exhibition, artist Yasmine Dabbous uses fiber arts and jewelry design to celebrate these consequential objects. Her hand-embroidered miniature mattresses project actual objects grabbed by refugees in twelve countries across four continents. The mattresses themselves hail yet another rooted mast for these tired lives on the move.
Underlying this celebration, where home becomes a trivial object, is a commentary about the collapse of humanity. Despite massive strides in cybernetics and genetics, civilization faces moral defeat when it fails to avert conflict, multiple refugee crises and millions of lives shattered.
House Under the Table, 2022, Oil and oil stick on canvas, 48 x 36 inLee Nowell-Wilson
House Under the Table
House Under the Table is a new body of work that illustrates a wrestling between the commonplace and the divine in the arena of one’s soul. With mothering as the lens, I examine my tendency to resent the mundane, along with the needed reconciliation I gain through the sacrifice of novelty. As I feel relegated to the floor as a parent to play house, pour fake tea and climb under tables repeatedly, it highlights my inability to truly sit. I question, why am I dismissive of this boredom?
The pieces of this exhibition employ an exaggeration of light and pattern to heighten the urgency of this question. In contrast to past work, I introduce an element of interior space, nostalgia and a use of paint to document the slow caricature of time. In the end, House Under the Table is my first exposure of an unreconciled heart expecting fulfillment from the wrong metaphorical laundry basket, mistaking material as debris and finding it again in the slow, monotony of mothering.
Courtesy of the artistHoesy Corona
PA’L NORTE
PA’L NORTE is the latest iteration of Corona’s ongoing project Climate Immigrants (2017- present) a series that problematizes notions around both immigration and climate change to highlight one of the most pressing issues of our time: environmental displacement in relationship to U.S-centric xenophobia—implicating ideas of land, borders, and environmental racism in the face of a global reshuffle.
In the gallery, the visitor is confronted with a series of large-scale fiber vignettes that picture a single isolated character journeying from a land untold. The roaming monochrome figures are obfuscated by bodysuits and headdresses that hide their identities from the viewer, echoing how dehumanization is weaponized in society to excuse the mistreatment of others. The prints on fabric, constructed from digitally altered performances-for-the- camera, are rendered full of hope as bodies of color thrusting forward despite the unknown.
IA&A at Hillyer is located at 9 Hillyer Ct, NW.
