SPECTRES
Nomad / Torrance Art Museum • Torrance CA • August 2024
Spectres is comprised of three textile sculptures created from fabric and armature. I printed the fabric with semi-legible archival images obtained from charred, corroded, and otherwise damaged front pages of a now-defunct newspaper, the Antelope Valley Ledger-Gazette (Lancaster, CA). The crumpled forms speak to memory, history, and the archive—the ways in which the past is idolized and mythologized as well as discarded, and the impossibility of ever really knowing what the past was like.
Spectres was originally created for a site-specific immersive installation at MOAH:CEDAR at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California. This exhibition, a mirror with breath like stone, spanned four galleries in an historic building and included textile sculptures, archival images from microfilm and glass plate negatives, vintage audio recordings, and historic artifacts from the museum's collection. The exhibition was accompanied by a 150-page, full-color publication.
Images from a mirror with breath like stone (2023):
Photos by Anna Pacheco.