Opening Reception: January 11th, 2025, 5-7 pm
On View: January 11th - February 22nd, 2025
Eleanor Harwood Gallery is pleased to present Kira Dominguez Hultgren’s fourth solo show with the gallery.
Dominguez Hultgren is a textile artist pulling from a wide variety of textile methods and heritages. Originally taught to weave by indigenous Mapuche women in Argentina, she culls from that history, using natural materials and techniques developed long before steel. She then intertwines modern materials such as plastics and works designed on a computer and realized on a jacquard loom to create her works.
Dominguez Hultgren’s newest exhibition “Our Daily Parenthetical” uses the shape of the parenthetical ( ) as a structural argument about how race is a contextual aside woven into every story she’s told or is telling.
A textile artist, Dominguez Hultgren uses her practice to explore the ways her family has negotiated race in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico through four-generations. (She was not-Indian, not-Indigenous, not-Black, not-Mexican, not-Portuguese-Dutch-Hawaiian). (She was not Yaqui, not Jumano, not Apache). (She was not really my aunt). (She was not Catholic, not Sikh, not Spiritualist). The women (the people) in Dominguez Hultgren’s family live between parentheticals, between hushed up identities, and tucked-away family histories. But it’s the unsaid stories that raised her. Now in this generation (sibling, cousins), they’re left picking at the edges of broken circles, simultaneously drawing together, and erasing the point of the parentheses (“dumpster diving our identity”).
Weaving together scholars Macarena Gómez-Barris’ and Hélène Cisoux’s theories of ecological and feminist entanglements, absorptions, and expulsions, Dominguez Hultgren steps into seemingly disparate archives and imagery and mixes-up parenthetical backdrops. Images turn textiles from a 2020 satellite photograph of the California wildfire smoke colliding with hurricane Sally, to a collection of photo slides from Dominguez Hultgren’s auntie Joyce’s art gallery at the Air India offices in Los Angeles in 1961.
A study of the imagery of the Virgin de Guadalupe in Chicana art (and family altars) from the 1960s to present also forms the backdrop for this show. While Dominguez Hultgren draws on many sources for this assembled archive of imagery, she is particularly inspired by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma López’s Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López's “Irreverent Apparition” (2011); Maria Esther Fernández and Laura E. Pérez’s curation of the retrospective exhibition, Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory (which Dominguez Hultgren had the opportunity to see at El Museo del Barrio in 2024); and ongoing conversations with artist Consuelo Jimenez-Underwood about the slippage between images of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue and the Virgin de Guadalupe often visualized in Jimenez-Underwood’s work.
Weaving as a process of archival entanglements, absorptions, and expulsions, Dominguez Hultgren creates parenthetical identities through the history of the loom, particularly the site of the “heddle” (like an eye of a needle) through which each warp yarn must pass before a fabric can be woven (at least on U.S. and European floor looms). Indigenous portable looms have a very different kind of heddle structure (an open loop, made from a continuous string of yarn). The indigenous heddle structure can be moved around onto different threads while weaving, so there is a lot of flexibility in the pattern and structure of the final fabric. But the tradeoff is that the weaving progresses slowly. In Europe, this open loop string heddle was turned into steel (more durable and efficient for weaving) and suddenly threads were easy to divide and control. The work in this show was made from both kinds of heddles (and a few others).
