Margins, Material & Metaphor

Margins, Material and Metaphor: Surabhi Ghosh + Olivia Valentine
Heaven Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
Exhibition: March 15 – April 28, 2019

Surabhi Ghosh resituates the marginalized narratives and visual phenomena that inhabit everyday spaces to the center. Combining the spectacular with the mundane, she transforms materials such as upholstery vinyl and glass beads through repetitive processes of drawing, cutting, and stitching. In doing so, she exposes the contradictions that necessitate constant renegotiation of multiple cultural identities within oneself.

Olivia Valentine’s work focuses on the construction of edges and interstitial spaces, stemming from her investigations into the space of the textile edge. She has traced the transition of lace structures from the center of a cloth to its edge and addressed the window as a space of mediation between interior and exterior. Recently refocusing her gaze to the ground, watercolor drawings on cast objects look at patterns in different scales and work in a place between algorithmic thinking and the accidental space of the spill.

Both Ghosh and Valentine use material and metaphor to challenge the composition of constructed spaces. In this exhibition, the two artists investigate their overlapping interest in materialized edges and metaphorical boundaries as defined by visual patterning. The installation of the individual artists’ sculptural textiles and drawings is a collaborative process between the two artists as they respond to the interior architecture of the gallery.

Photos by Robert Chase Heishman, courtesy of Heaven Gallery
More at: Heaven Gallery