Fairs
ZⓈONAMACO, MX, 2023
Praxis presents: Josefina Concha E.
Date and place
Place: Ciudad de México, MX
Start Date: February 09 2023
End Date: February 12 2023
Description
Praxis is pleased to present Mirilla, a solo exhibition by Chilean artist Josefina Concha E. (b.1985) at Zona Maco 2023, Mexico City.
Our booth, ZMS2, is located within Zona Maco SUR. SUR is the fair curated section by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas, who selected projects that conceive the idea of the global south and are inspired by the concepts of the feminine, the female embodiment, and empowerment, and the interrelation of these concepts in a broader spectrum.
Suspended from the ceiling or attached to the walls at the Praxis booth, Josefina Concha E’s handmade textiles assume an ethereal quality and appear to float or be organic outgrowths of the surfaces to which they are fixed.
A master of textile art, Concha is inspired by nature, the human body, and the resemblances between them. In the texture of skin, hair, plants and animals Concha sees new pictorial avenues which layers of woven thread can produce. Despite the imperfections inherent in weaving, as in all manual labor, Concha’s work seeks to achieve both order and harmony.
Often taking spiral forms and eternal lines, her woven textiles appear as if they were born naturally from a sewing machine, and possess the capacity to grow infinitely: they have a beginning, but no end. By weaving, she realizes the possibility of creating a painting without paint or a brush, echoing the traditional textiles produced by Latin American women for centuries.
Through a communion with craft and nature, her work mirrors a myriad of patterns and symbols native to her continent. For the artist, weaving is a mesmerizing process that requires she be fully present, body and mind in tune. Like cultivating a garden, it is a meticulous labor that cannot be rushed and provides stillness for the spirit, in the manner of a mantra.
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More Information
Statement:
My work concentrates on the use of a meta-pictorial resource: instead of painting, I sew and I explore the qualities of the thread, trying to recreate gestures that go from the saturation of the material to the synthesis of the line, from the expressiveness of the stain to the definition of an image, which tends to be more evocative and less defined.
The making of my work conjoins three discrete components: thread, cloth, and the time that I dedicate to sewing it. In the final work, these elements appear intertwined. Time becomes visible as the movement of color through space and the superimposition of wefts, which together form a dense body that is greater than the sum of its parts and in which a transitory and light image is created.
My work bears an ambivalent relationship to painting: while it approaches painting through its intention to simulate it, it simultaneously distances itself from painting through the will to replace it.