Natalia de la rosa, Textile Woman.
Textile Woman, Yohanna M Roa
3 May, 2022Textile Woman: New Historiographical Atlas
28 August, 2022
Original Spanish link: Textile Woman- Yohanna M Roa, by Natalia de la Rosa: https://casadeltiempo.uam.mx/index.php/17-ct-vi-2/226-ct-vi-2-mujer-textil-de-yohanna-m-roa-natalia-de-la-rosa
Textile Woman
By Natalia de La Rosa
Here is the revised version with some style corrections: The Colombian-American artist Yohanna M. Roa presented the exhibition *Textile Woman* at the ArtLatinou gallery in Mexico City. The title of the exhibition reflects the project's overarching theme, which focuses on exploring the relationship between art and textile work through a feminist lens. The exhibition’s curator, Karen Cordero Reiman, explains that the uniqueness of Roa's work lies in its transdisciplinarity, as it merges sewing, archival work, and performance. The exhibition features fifteen works in various formats, including intervened prints, engravings with seams, embroidery, crochet with added beads, lace, and fringes. It is both a theoretical investigation, informed by the artist’s academic background, and a practical exploration rooted in sewing and weaving practices. This work is also deeply connected to the artist's personal history, as her grandfather was a tailor and her grandmother a dressmaker. The exhibition weaves together multiple layers, as the curatorship and selection of materials create a kind of meta-weaving, merging elements that might seem contradictory: art and sewing, writing and embroidery, high art and decorative art, machine-made and handcrafted work, and hegemonic knowledge versus alternative epistemologies.
Here is the revised version with some style corrections: The Colombian-American artist Yohanna M. Roa presented the exhibition *Textile Woman* at the ArtLatinou gallery in Mexico City. The title of the exhibition reflects the project's overarching theme, which focuses on exploring the relationship between art and textile work through a feminist lens. The exhibition’s curator, Karen Cordero Reiman, explains that the uniqueness of Roa's work lies in its transdisciplinarity, as it merges sewing, archival work, and performance. The exhibition features fifteen works in various formats, including intervened prints, engravings with seams, embroidery, crochet with added beads, lace, and fringes. It is both a theoretical investigation, informed by the artist’s academic background, and a practical exploration rooted in sewing and weaving practices. This work is also deeply connected to the artist's personal history, as her grandfather was a tailor and her grandmother a dressmaker. The exhibition weaves together multiple layers, as the curatorship and selection of materials create a kind of meta-weaving, merging elements that might seem contradictory: art and sewing, writing and embroidery, high art and decorative art, machine-made and handcrafted work, and hegemonic knowledge versus alternative epistemologies.
The exhibition takes full advantage of the gallery space, transforming the typical "white cube" into an environment that oscillates between the domestic setting and the art space. This curatorial decision allows for an expanded dialogue and tension between the artistic object and the textile object, introducing a complementary dichotomy based on the connection between body and architecture. This is achieved through the careful selection of specific furniture pieces as museographic elements—such as a pair of tables, a sculptural cushion, and a rug—alongside the fusion of two fabrics in the piece that lends its name to the exhibition, *Textile Woman* (2022). The relationship between construction, furniture, and clothing becomes a pivotal aspect of the exhibition, as it challenges the idea of the passive curatorial device by incorporating bodily action, its traces, and open-ended possibilities.
The exhibition is part of a larger series, with ¨Textile Woman-Habitat¨ (2019) as its direct predecessor, which was presented in Cali, Colombia. In that work, Roa combined performative action with a full textile environment through a dress that doubled as an environment. For this new exhibition, as in the previous one, the activation of architecture through the artist's body was a central element. On the opening day, Yohanna wore an outfit consisting of a dress, pants, and blouse in shades of purple, adorned with beaded embroidery, a fringed hat, and feminine images from art books, which she then wove into the fabric of her attire. She also wore a belt/harness, which allowed her to attach hanging fabric fragments to the walls she directly intervened.
By wearing this suit, Roa transformed the decorative and contemplative nature of the object, returning it to a ritualistic state. She disrupted the static definition of the space by merging with the tapestry, moving through and altering the sense of the mounted works—cutting out butterfly wings printed on fabric or tearing apart pages from books. This suit serves as the axis of the exhibition, guiding reflection and potentially redefining the meaning of the surrounding works: architecture becomes embodied, canvases on the wall are brought down, anthropological images break free from their taxonomy, and Western notions of femininity are questioned.
The artist’s book ¨Fe de errata¨ reinforces this approach, as Roa “rewrites” a traditional 1933 biology textbook by altering its patterns to challenge medical concepts and definitions rooted in the colonial/patriarchal perspectives of modernity. This process reflects a method of inquiry and a broad selection of bibliographic materials through which Yohanna Roa has created an alternative framework for understanding archives, collections, and art itself, one based on transgression and reconstitution.
¨Textile Woman¨ uses references to sewing and the domestic sphere to prompt a broader reflection on the History of Art itself ¨Statement 1¨ and ¨Statement 2¨ are two attempts aimed at questioning the methods of study and dissemination within the discipline by unraveling the canonical narrative and reinventing a language. This is achieved through the mechanical fabric that layers overprinted images and letters, woven together by threads following a fretwork pattern. This pattern forms an experimental alphabet, where color and shape suggest new meanings and abstract languages. The act of turning the pages vertically further disrupts traditional reading patterns, rearranging the way the text is understood.
The works Cenefas I, Ventana, Tapiz, Mantel, and Ornamento represent another significant shift. These pieces challenge the conventional notion of the image as something that resides solely in reproduction within textbooks, the foundation of a literate pedagogy for studying art. By altering their meaning as everyday objects, these works transcend the boundary between aesthetic and utilitarian items. Instead, they propose the reappropriation of Western art references—such as a Renaissance mural, a Baroque engraving, and a neoclassical painting—which Roa reinterprets through scraps, cutouts from the same books, embroidery, and collages, reintroducing a direct functionality as suggested by their titles, whether to decorate, look through, or cover. In this way, the figures and narrative structures of the opening scenes—whether mythical, allegorical, or landscape—are transformed by cutting, contouring, texture, and color.
My Chest with Flowers engages in dialogue with this group, as it uses an illustrated page that shifts direction, incorporating embroidery and a frame. Once again, the work underscores the relationship between corporeality and construction by using a pink lace as a tapestry to transform the wall. This detail reinforces and constantly reminds us that this exhibition was defined by an emphasis on our own lived experience.
On the other hand, the pieces Family Portrait I, Family Portrait II and Family Portrait III take up the pictorial genre and the Dutch, rococo and neoclassical traditions to delve into the motif of the female figure. In this way, the artist questions the forms of representation of femininity in art, from the intervention in pages of art history books or prints on pearled paper with embroidery, tulle, and beads added to the frames in crochet or lace. In this exercise, materiality is taken to the extreme by completely covering characters, frame is an element that unifies the image with its support and gives another meaning to the reading of the portrait.
Finally, Yohanna Roa presents an exploration dedicated to The Last Judgment by Michelangelo. Using watercolor, Roa colors these corpulent figures in bright hues. At the same time, she reconstructs this mural using linocuts and a frame with colorful lace. Likewise, it reconstructs a chapel under a game that starts from the printed and two-dimensional translation and returns to the architectural plastic, this time on a scale where the Chapel reconstruction redirects the reception and personalizes it towards another type of body, different from the one defined as an ideal in the Renaissance. (1)
Finally, Yohanna Roa presents an exploration dedicated to The Last Judgment by Michelangelo. Using watercolor, Roa colors these corpulent figures in bright hues. At the same time, she reconstructs this mural using linocuts and a frame with colorful lace. Likewise, it reconstructs a chapel under a game that starts from the printed and two-dimensional translation and returns to the architectural plastic, this time on a scale where the Chapel reconstruction redirects the reception and personalizes it towards another type of body, different from the one defined as an ideal in the Renaissance. (1)
This exhibition is essential for understanding various methodological possibilities for thinking about and studying art. It is important to consider these formulations beyond the artistic, poetic, and aesthetic realms, adopting a method that directly impacts the institutions themselves—whether museums, galleries, libraries, or archives—by creating options that did not previously exist, as explained by Ariella Azoulay and Ananda Cohen-Aponte, who envision these alternative spaces. (2)
Mujer Textil, ©Yohanna M. Roa.
Documentación: © Antonio Juárez C.
[1] Katherine McKittrick (ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Durham, Duke University Press, 2015.
[2] Ariella Azoulay, Historia potencial y otros ensayos, México: Conaculta, 2014; y Ananda Cohen-Aponte, “Reimagining Lost Visual Archives of Black and Indigenous Resistance”, en Selva: A Journal of the History of Art, 3, otoño de 2021, pp. 157-174.