Monumental Fiber : Threads Mapping Man, Cities and the Cosmos is the brainchild of Dotti Cichon which features the work of three artists, Eszter Bornemisza (Hungary), Anitta Toivio (Finland) and Dotti Cichon herself (USA). This exhibition incorporates photography, installation, painting and mixed media fiber art to convey altered perceptions of our environments and each other. It’s running at the Vargas Gallery at Mission College from February 18 – March 28. I had the pleasure of catching the opening reception last night.
Monumental Fiber : Threads Mapping Man, Cities and the Cosmos – Vargas Gallery
Mission College’s Gillmor Center, in which the Vargas Gallery is situated, is quite a spectacle at night!
I love Cichon’s work! She travels extensively taking architecturally inspired photographs which she then manipulates into kaleidoscopic patterns – printed in this exhibition on silk banners. To me, these pieces transform the familiar into something that seems to reveal the spiritual core of its source material.
Eszter Bornemeisza, from Budapest, Hungary, works with bits of ephemera to construct labyrinth-like layered maps as a launching point for exploring personal and community narratives. It’s easy to get drawn in to the tactile details, threads and netting, maps and cryptic equations of nuclear physics.
Detail from Bornemisza’s layered panels, Mission College Instructor and Sculptor, Lynne Todaro and Dotti Cichon, Vargas Gallery
Finnish painter, Anitta Toivio paints people not as she sees them but as she senses them, through the energy they emit the memories they hold onto, their auras. Emotional Portraits are spiritual portraits on silk.
The Landscape in Us, a collaboration by Cichon and Toivo are photographs, a Finnish forrest printed on fabric and a video projection of a California seascape video on an overlay of organza, melding two landscapes representative to each of these artists.
As you can tell I’m a fan of Cichon’s work, sporting one of her silk scarves, the wearable version of one of the panels in front of which we are standing. Mine is based on graffiti from Florence!