2025-05-10 05:18:14
When María Fernanda Camarena and Gabriel Rosas Alemán aren’t in their Mexico City studio, you might find them pulling weeds or chopping vegetables. “We love cooking and gardening—practices rooted in care, and ones we’d love to weave into our work someday,” they say. “There’s a quiet mindfulness in both that aligns perfectly with what we aim to express.”
This desire to care roots much of the artists’ practice, which they present together under the name Celeste. Thinking of themselves as hosts, Celeste transforms galleries and museums with large-scale textile installations. In warm shades of pinks, oranges, and reds, the translucent cotton often allows light to filter through and cast tinted shadows around the space. Each work becomes a sort of mise-en-scène as viewers are invited to lounge with friends, enjoy a meal, or perform among the textiles.
The earthy color palette—originally inspired by natural dyeing materials like avocado pit and turmeric root—began after the onset of COVID-19, when the artists wanted to create “an atmosphere that felt like an embrace, a much-needed warmth after the isolation of 2020,” they say. “This concept of solace stayed with us, and today, the palette has come to symbolize safe spaces, with the womb as a recurring motif: a protected, intimate interior.”
Projects include “Contra el miedo y la oscuridad, la fiesta colorida y feliz,” or “Against fear and darkness, the colorful and happy party,” made in collaboration with a 4th-grade class from Mexico City’s Granada neighborhood. After adding their own drawings to the cotton panels, the students used the vivid installation as the backdrop for a school festival.
The monumental “Melons Covered in Willow Leaves” is even more immersive, as viewers were invited to wander underneath a tent of draped fabric. And in their most recent exhibition at Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco, the artists have installed a trio of suspended works that bisect the gallery, with arched openings that allow visitors to pass through. Referencing Diego Rivera’s “Agua, el origen de la vida” mural, the triad explores the connections between water and the impact of Mexico City’s colonial history on its landscape.
Later this month at The Bentway in Toronto, the pair will also present “Casting a Net, Casting a Spell,” a quilted canopy of 100 individual panels created as both a suncatcher and a necessary repreieve from the summer rays. It’s their largest project to date.
With each work, Celeste hopes to “invite the spectator not only in the sense of contemplation but rather in the involvement with the ceremonial… In this setting, the sensorial and emotional realms are recognized as legitimate sources of knowledge and an experience of hospitality and acknowledgment can take place without restrictions.”
Celeste’s Hacer brotar / To sprout is on view through June 14 in San Francisco. Explore much more of the duo’s practice and process on their website and Instagram.
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2025-05-09 22:59:52
Caio Marcolini’s fascination with organic systems began simply enough. It was “the trail left by the sea on the sand, the intertwined roots of trees within the forest, (and) the flowers falling from trees” that he found enchanting. But then, when his first child was born in 2021, he began investigating how these same winding, looping, knotted patterns appeared inside the body.
What resulted is a series of roving sculptures woven with thin strips of brass, copper, and iron wire. Hollow tubes emerge from delicate bell-like forms secured to a wall, while occasional, long drips drop from the upper area and dangle mid-air.
Trained as a goldsmith, Marcolini incorporates jewelry-making techniques and industrial design principles into his painstaking, entirely hand-powered process. Using a mallet, dowels, and various manual tools, the Brazilian artist creates a perfectly uniform mesh that he then shapes into supple, rounded forms. “I rarely draw—just small sketches—and most of the time, I imagine a shape using initial parameters,” he says. “The compositions are made in an exploratory way, fluid and organic, as I weave the structure and experiment on the studio wall. I can say it’s a very intuitive process.”
As the artist sees it, these individual, linked metal pieces are like single cells or DNA that repeat again and again, spawning new forms. While distinct in shape, the sculptures are still malleable, transparent, and abstract. The works resemble the circuitous systems found in the human body, but also the creatures found in forests and oceans, and occupy a sort of ambiguous, hybrid space.
Marcolini titles his collections with words like colony, system, captured, and bilateral. Referencing the relationship between single components and the larger whole, each body of work becomes a sort of community of organisms that seem to take on a life of their own. Rather than impose a particular interpretation, the artist leaves the exact form of the works open-ended, as if they might morph into new life at any moment.
Not Every Repetition is a Return, Marcolini’s solo exhibition, is on view through May 23 at Galeria Lica Pedrosa in São Paulo. Find more of his work on his website and Instagram.
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2025-05-08 23:30:37
On large swaths of colorful mesh, Kandy G. Lopez embroiders large-scale portraits of people from historically marginalized communities. “Her works are created out of the necessity to learn something new about her people and culture,” says a statement.
Drawing on her Afro-Caribbean ancestry, the Fort Lauderdale-based artist celebrates the style, culture, and heritage of individuals as a way to build connections and generate dialogue around representation.
Lopez began working with mesh and fiber almost ten years ago, but she began to approach it more seriously as a major tenet of her practice in 2021 while an artist-in-residence at The Hambidge Center in Georgia. “As a painter, my backgrounds were minimal. Sometimes they would have monochromatic cityscapes,” Lopez tells Colossal, “So, leaving the background rare is something I’m familiar with.”
Visibility, presence, and representation are vital to the artist’s work. In each composition, she centers vibrantly dressed, life-size figures so their gazes directly meet the viewer. Through the use of material and metaphor — like layered threads suggesting how BIPOC individuals “disappear and reappear” — she intertwines notions of community, resilience, and narrative. “I love the connections and stories that the individuals tell but also how the stories narrate the material,” she says.
The gridded backgrounds evoke associations with neighborhood street patterns and the overlapping layers of woven warp and weft. “I also love the metaphor in transparency, layers, and vulnerability,” the artist says, sharing that she sometimes still incorporates cityscapes painted onto the mesh.
Lopez is represented by ACA Galleries. See more on her website and Instagram.
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2025-05-08 22:09:10
Imagine standing at a window at dawn as the pale yellow morning light filters through the trees, slowly illuminating flower petals and setting the scene for birdsong. As you move around, the light dapples and changes, and details emerge or disappear around other forms. For Élise Peroi, this sensation provides a starting point for elegant textile sculptures.
Onto graceful wooden frames, the French artist weaves ethereal, layered screens evocative of dreamy portals to nature. “The luminosity of Peroi’s woven paintings is such that we might feel ourselves carried outside to watch the sky brighten, the air soft against our skin,” says Dr. Rebecca Birrell in an essay accompanying Peroi’s solo exhibition, For Thirsting Flowers, at CARVALHO PARK.
The artist taps into the long tradition of European tapestries, which were used for both decoration and to help keep homes and churches insulated. Stitched by hand, the works could reach architectonic proportions and contain highly detailed figurative and narrative scenes. Peroi departs from customary associations with tapestries by removing the pieces from the wall and creating standalone, self-supporting structures.
She also emphasizes a kind of opening-up of the textile itself. The interactions between warp and weft are loose, delicate, and irregular. And each piece’s depth is determined by the wooden framework, details of which often jut outward in gentle yet willful angles.
Peroi’s sculptures appear to subtly morph as one walks around, merging internal and external perspectives. The artist explores relationships between emptiness, form, perception, and the built environment, hinting at recognizable shapes like flowers and foliage set against muted diamond-shaped geometric patterns or open spaces in the weave. And the frames serve both as display devices and looms—the process and finished piece merged into one.
For Thirsting Flowers continues in Brooklyn through May 23. See more on the artist’s website.
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2025-05-08 06:07:51
Depending on the day, you might look to the sky and see a sea of pale blue or a radiant sunset creeping toward the horizon. If you’re in a major metropolitan area, though, you might also be met with the characteristic red-brown haze of smog.
Berlin-based artist Macarena Ruiz-Tagle is behind the vibrant Cyanometer and Sunset postcards we’ve featured on Colossal (and that have sold out in our shop several times). But she also created a third version designed for those not-so-bright days.
The World Health Organization estimates that 99 percent of people on Earth breathe unsafe air, making Ruiz-Tagle’s Air Pollution postcard perhaps the most fitting for our era of climate catastrophe. While a stark contrast to the brilliant blues, yellows, and oranges of the other two, this design is awash in pale pinks and grays to match that of a gloomy, and even soiled, atmosphere. Like the others, the idea is to hold the work up to the sky and mark the corresponding hue before dropping it in the mail.
The interactive card shifts in meaning depending on whether the opening reveals a misty fog or air thick with chemicals, and it’s part of a growing movement to track climate data in a tangible, grassroots manner. “Separating the visual delight of being immersed in a cloud from the intoxicating reality of breathing heavily polluted air, the postcard evokes both the smog that engulfs global cities and the ethereal beauty of fog,” the artist writes. “In its mesmerizing aesthetic ambiguity, the work sustains a space for contemplation within our troubled atmosphere.”
Find all three postcards in the Colossal Shop, and explore more of Ruiz-Tagle’s work on her website.
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2025-05-07 22:21:57
A quote widely attributed to Tom Robbins says, “At the typewriter you find out who you are.” Or in the case of one unique machine that’s been missing for decades, the same could be said for finding one, too.
In January, Jennifer Felix and her husband Nelson were sorting through items in Jennifer’s grandfather’s basement in New York. They stumbled upon a typewriter like they’d never seen, with Chinese keys. Nelson posted a few photos in a Facebook group called What’s My Typewriter Worth? “From my internet search it looks to be a Chinese-made MingKwai,” he wrote. “I just can’t find any ever sold here in the States. Is it even worth anything? It weighs a ton!”
Resounding enthusiasm rippled through the comments, as it turned out the machine was indeed a MingKwai — named for being “clear and fast” — the only one of its kind in the world.
Missing for more than half a century, the discovery prompted a multitude of messages from people around the world wanting to purchase the machine or place it into museums. It is now in the collection of Stanford Libraries.
Invented in 1947 by writer, translator, and linguist Lin Yutang, the typewriter was the first compact concept to feature a keyboard that could produce the Chinese language’s 80,000-plus characters. He accomplished this by creating a kind of sort-and-search method.
“Lin broke down Chinese ideographs into more fundamental components of strokes and shapes and arranged the characters in a linear order, like an English dictionary does with alphabetic words,” researcher Yangyang Chen describes in Made in China Journal.
The keyboard consists of 72 options, which can be combined to create one’s desired characters. Chen continues:
By pressing one of the 36 top character component keys and one of the 28 bottom component keys simultaneously, the machine would find up to eight corresponding characters. The user could see the candidates through a special viewing window on the device, which Lin called his “magic eye,” and select the correct one by pushing the respective numerical key.
The Carl E. Krum Company built the only known prototype of the MingKwai, says Stanford Report. Lin was unable to drum up enough commercial interest to produce the expensive machine, so he sold the prototype and rights to Mergenthaler Linotype Company, where Jennifer Felix’s grandfather was employed as a machinist. The typewriter never entered production, and it eventually disappeared—until now.
Stanford plans to use the unique machine for research, exhibits, and academic programs. Regan Murphy-Kao, director of the East Asia Library, says, “I couldn’t be happier to have the opportunity to steward, preserve, and make this extraordinary prototype accessible for scholarship.”
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