ATA Window Gallery presents: Exoskeleton: You Cannot Return to the Dirt
July 1- 30, 2024
“Exoskeleton” explores through the medium of textile art the complexity of holding nostalgia for a time that holds much pain; to lay bare the feeling of growing up queer and disabled, in a body that has never been yours. Like freshly shed skin, I expose the complexities of false memories and the never ending need to change, to escape. I mix textile collage of fabrics from clothing owned by family members, owned by me, things I can never put on my body again because of the weight of the thing I experienced seeped in that cloth. I combine this with beadwork and embroidery to outline the cocoon of memories, such as lovingly stitching my childhood room’s wall paper, or hand beading the emotions of memories. I meld my mind and body, the feel of a cicada nymph’s too tight exoskeleton that must be shed to move on. I try to express the feelings of crawling from the dirt that you knew as home to grow and change into something new, something you must be. A struggling attempt to reclaim my mind and body as my own, to break from my past, to be new like a fresh cicada in the morning dew. Through a colorful explosion I share the notion that pain is not always best expressed by darkness, but rather with the bright color of a child’s memory.
Z. Fondanarosa
Drawing inspiration from natural history museum diorama displays, I’m positioning my creature-like vinyl works in the ATA window space interacting in a neon-backdropped environment to tell a fictional story about the plastic-based nature we are living in now and will continue to see. The placement of creatures in the scene signifies something about their role in the environment–how they fight, reproduce, get energy, and sense their surroundings–including the people of Valencia Street. The vinyl creatures become in this scenario like the taxidermied specimens meant to tell onlookers something about life from the past, about the individuals that didn’t survive.