PRESS RELEASE
Music for Weavers is an expression and processing of relationship abuse, survival, and recovery. The artists utilize film portraiture, hand weaving, and musical improvisation to question the notion of a centralized self and rigid patterns of behavior in the face of identity-splitting trauma and painstaking reintegration.
The exhibition will feature four largescale prints of analog photographs featuring a masked subject in bold, vibrant styling and colors. By opting to show the face obscured by a mask crafted from fragments by Oakland-based craftsperson and artist Sadie Greyduck, and by using multiple exposure techniques on different film stocks, these portraits adamantly resist the viewer’s access to the soul, instead refracting the gaze through a sea of scarlet.
Five weavings made from a single overshot pattern provide a grounding counterpart to the photographic images, but nonetheless do not offer the viewer relief from constant change. Though they follow a pattern, they refuse to repeat, instead dancing around a shared motif and warping it past recognition.
The works in the exhibition embody the quiet rage of the weaver who executes patterns obediently, her mind thriving secretly in dreams of living undisrupted by social and interpersonal agreements. Drawing on the power and pain locked inside patternmaking, repetition, and the destruction of obligations, Music for Weavers provides a transformative sanctuary for viewers intent on dissolving oppressive bonds.
The development of Music for Weavers and ensuing exhibition were supported, in part, by a grant from 4Culture. The exhibition will open through a public reception with live improvised musical performance by enereph on Thursday, February 1, from 5-9PM at 117 S Main St., Seattle, and will be on view from M-F from 8-5PM through March 27, 2024.
enereph is a persona of multidisciplinary artist Connie Fu. Fu was born in 1992 in metro Detroit and studied at Harvard University and Pratt Institute in New York. In the ensuing decade, she worked as a studio assistant, program coordinator, and freelance educator for arts organizations in Cleveland, Portland, and Seattle. Her work has been exhibited by FiveMyles, Brooklyn (2020) and The Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston (2021), and her first full-scale solo exhibition was presented by The Sculpture Center, Cleveland (2023), with support from the Cleveland Institute of Art.
The artist’s sonic work was supported by OneBeat, an initiative of the US Department of State, through two international residencies in 2021 and 2022. Her atmospheric, percussive, labyrinthine compositions have been presented live, on radio, and as recorded releases by Acceleration Radio, Vancouver (2023), Ground Hum, Seattle (2023), ANTiPODE, Seattle (2023), Active Passive Performance Society, Galiano Island (2023), and Heterodox Records, Portland (2021).
Heartless Twyla (Twyla Sampaco) is a queer Filipina-American photographer and self-published author based in Seattle, WA. Preferring old, gifted, and novelty film cameras, she makes the most of faulty shutters and ambient light and reprocesses unresolved trauma with the romance of plastic lenses, leaking light seals, and inconsistent film advance mechanisms. Her intensive analog photography process gives her something tangible to do with her hands, and creative latitude for expressing emotional truth. Her photographs have been exhibited at Vermillion Gallery, Seattle (2021), A-Gallery, Seattle (2023), Mutiny Gallery, Seattle (2022), the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Seattle (2020), and the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, Port Angeles, WA (2019).
Twyla graduated from the University of Washington with a bachelor's degree in Material Science & Engineering and a certificate in Program Management. In 2021, she self-published her first book, Technicolor Nightmare, a photo memoir about surviving bipolar disorder in her twenties. In 2023, she published Monochrome Daydream and Fragile; not like a Flower. Twyla’s current projects are surviving bipolar disorder in her thirties and completing her fourth book. She is a resident artist at Blue Cone Studios in Capitol Hill.
For all press inquiries, contact
TJ Hoving agallery@integrusarch.com 206.628.3137