char tan: warp/weft
April 6 - 30, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 6 from 5-7pm
Gallery Hours: Weds - Sat 11am - 5pm
Minnesota Street Project, Room 204
1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco
re.riddle is pleased to present Warp/Weft by Charlene Tan in her debut solo exhibition with the gallery. The opening reception is on Saturday, April 6 from 5-7pm at 1275 Minnesota Street, Room 204. The exhibition runs through April 30, 2024.
The exhibition program features In Conversation: Charlene Tan x Matthew Villar Miranda on Saturday, April 20, 2024, at 11am. The artist will speak with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s (BAMPFA) Curatorial Associate Matthew Villar Miranda about diasporic material culture in her practice. Extending from the exhibition's theme, guests are invited to enjoy ube mooncakes (a purple yam dessert) and coffee during the event.
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
What are the tangible and immaterial threads that tie us to our ancestors, and how are these distilled throughout the diasporic community? Can reclaimed cultural practices transmute colonial legacies and empower shared narratives of joy, beauty, and pride? In her debut solo exhibition at re.riddle, entitled Warp/Weft, Filipina-Chinese-American artist Charlene Tan delves into the realm of cultural simulacra and the poetics of materiality. Developing her own visual language, the artist reinterprets traditional Filipino tribal weavings in her mosaic-like compositions. She intertwines indigenous signifiers and generational craftsmanship with contemporary digital processes, bridging the distance between herself and her ancestors.
Tan’s raw materials include foods and vivid pigments evocative of The Philippines, where she spent her childhood and her formative years. Tapioca pearls are self-contained diasporic manifestations—stemming from the Brazilian cassava root, often misidentified as Asian in popular food culture. The artist’s use of tapioca pearls in her dense compositions results in a texture reminiscent of intricate beading, invoking her grandmother’s hand-beaded embroidery—a commonly overlooked painstaking manual labor that often defines the immigrant experience. The work also incorporates ube (or purple yam), a root regularly associated with Filipino cuisine, offering a vibrant purple hue that Tan uses as a pigment affixed to a digitally printed pattern, creating a visual and tactile motif in low relief. The patterns Tan creates are a synthesis of traditional motifs originating from two distinct regions, Manila (representing her mother) and Bicol (representing her father), with each possessing its own ethnic identity. However, visual data is lost with each scan, alluding to the degrees of erasure and a kind of native de-assimilation that accompanies separation from one’s ancestral home.
Traditional cuisine and clothing are a conduit for immigrants and second-generation communities to connect with their respective origins, honor their heritages, and construct a blended social ecology. Tan acknowledges the symbolism of these materials while reconfiguring them as an integral part of her contemporary visual and sensorial lexicon, a respatialization of the humble domestic labor of textile production. Through her research methodology and multi-layered process, Tan investigates the space between the metahistory of pattern design and the laborious physical act of weaving her chosen materials into new systems of meaning, a muscle memory of cultural expression that resists colonial narratives while reimagining a plurality of diasporic futures.
PROGRAMMING
Image Credits: Charlene Tan ©Alanna Hale, Matthew Villar Miranda ©Kameron Herndon.
In Conversation: Charlene Tan x Matthew Villar Miranda
Saturday, April 20, 2024, at 11AM
Minnesota Street Project, Gallery 204
1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco
Charlene Tan speaks with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s (BAMPFA) Curatorial Associate Matthew Villar Miranda about diasporic material culture in her practice. Extending from the exhibition's theme, guests are invited to enjoy ube mooncakes (a purple yam dessert) and coffee during the event.
Matthew Villar Miranda (he/they/siya) is Curatorial Associate at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In their former position as Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center, they worked on exhibitions by Julie Mehretu, Pao Houa Her, Paul Chan, and Pacita Abad. They serve on the Board of Stakeholders Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a Ford and Mellon Foundation-funded initiative of an intergenerational, cross-institutional coalition of art museum professionals committed to advancing equity across the museum field. In 2021, they co-curated the Art for Justice Fund-supported exhibition Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration at the Arizona State University Art Museum (ASUAM). They received their BA in History of Art from UC Berkeley (2013) and graduated among the inaugural Class of ASU-Los Angeles County Museum of Art Master's Fellowship in Art History (2021).
Artworks
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