tana quincy arcega: spirit of scrappiness
October 12 - November 9, 2023
Opening Reception: October 12th, 5:00 - 7:00pm
Minnesota Street Project, Gallery 204
1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco
re.riddle is pleased to present, Spirit of Scrappiness, a solo exhibition of new work by Tana Quincy Arcega from October 12 to November 9, 2023. The opening reception is on October 12 from 5-7pm at 1275 Minnesota St. Gallery 204, San Francisco.
Exhibition Statement
How might we apply an ecology of care to the discarded, the overlooked and the forgotten? What redemption is to be found in assigning beauty and purpose to the ruins, to working within a set of inherited parameters, limited to what we already have? Spirit of Scrappiness, an exhibition of new abstract textile works by Tana Quincy Arcega, bridges materiality and sustainability to reveal an embodied philosophy of resilience, tenacity, and tender playfulness.
For Quincy Arcega, scrappiness is both a personal belief system and an existential imperative—a practice that transcends the internal and external to transform fragmented parts into a unified whole. In this new body of work, Quincy Arcega’s unique history is interwoven with concepts of care, manifested by her (re)use of remnant textiles, garment patterns, and seemingly delicate found objects. Born in Nebraska, the artist grew up learning to sew and emulate patterns in her mother’s fabric store, a material-based background that fuses with her formal art training in figurative painting and sculpture. Quincy Arcega understands the notion of scrappiness as an extension of the fabric industry itself—from the invisible laborers who must personify scrappiness as a means of survival, to the inanimate shreds of leftover textiles deemed unimportant or expendable.
Quincy Arcega’s practice invites degrees of tension into her works through each composition’s negotiation of form and function, as well as the artist’s process of stretching, threading, layering, and extruding. She describes her technique as “material rhyming,” in which myriad textures, colors, lines and shapes coalesce in poetic visual topographies. By stitching together fragments representative of time, place and identity, Quincy Arcega’s works double as psychographic maps, tracing her own creative history through what the artist describes as a “mimicry of materials.”
When viewed holistically, Spirit of Scrappiness testifies to an ethos of upside-down consumerism, a mindset and a worldview desperately needed to confront the challenges imposed by climate change and a fraying social fabric that can feel increasingly untenable. When we combine the two literal meanings of scrappy, we get a pugnacious determination to utilize the vast odds and ends around us into a cohesive whole, ultimately choosing to be partakers in rather than consumers of materiality. Scrappiness allows us, as individuals and as part of a larger ecosystem, to reclaim value and maximize resources, to reimagine what it means to be “whole,” and to heal society, the earth and ourselves in the process.
Programming
In Conversation: Tana Quincy Arcega x Lynda Grose
Saturday, November 4 at 11AM
Minnesota Street Project, Gallery 204
Designer, author, and educator Lynda Grose speaks with contemporary artist Tana Quincy Arcega about her multimedia practice, textiles, and sustainability. This program is presented in conjunction with Spirit of Scrappiness, a solo exhibition of new work by Tana Quincy Arcega at Minnesota Street Project, Gallery 204 in San Francisco. Exhibition runs until November 9.
Lynda Grose is a designer, author, educator, and has worked in fashion and sustainability for more than 30 years. Her professional activity spans design, craft-based micro-enterprise development and research through studio practice. She co-founded ESPRIT’s ecollection in 1992 which was the first 'ecologically responsible' clothing line marketed internationally by a major corporation and set pioneering standards, which became adopted industry wide. Her most recent works invite the public to contribute to post growth narratives, including designing garments with the potential to evolve over time, and exploring the cultural potency of labels to identify secondhand purchases. Grose is co-author of the book: Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change, and is contributing author to Opening Up the Wardrobe, The Routledge Handbook on Sustainable Fashion, Sustainable Textiles: Life Cycle and Environmental Impact, and Sustainability in Fashion and Textiles: Values, Design, Production and Consumption. Her work has been featured in: Historical perspectives on Sustainable Fashion, Fashion Today, Design + Environment, Eco Chic, Beyond Green, Elle, Metropolis, Textile View, to name a few. Grose sees art and design as a force that can help give form to a sustainable society and is passionate about emergent roles for artists and designers working in this context. She is a founding board member of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion (UCRF), serves on the board of Re/Make, and is a Professor in Fashion Design and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.
Born in Nebraska 1977, Tana Quincy Arcega obtained a BFA from the University of Nebraska and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art where she studied figurative painting and sculpture. Her painting practice explores the immanent qualities of materials, rooting downward. A coinciding contemplative practice probes upward towards transcendence. At the coalescence of these is a centeredness on compassion, healing, and able-ness. Though classically trained as a figurative oil painter, physical limitations prompted the use of alternative materials and mark-making approaches. Strangely, these limitations greatly expanded her practice. She explores processes such as mouth painting, sewing, and extrusion painting using all kinds of media including building materials and industrial textiles. Her mouth paintings were featured in Her Living magazine in the story, “Overcoming Obstacles". She taught studio art at museums, colleges, and after school programs for seven years and partnered with Make-A-Wish Foundation to teach a 7-year-old girl with cancer to paint artwork that would hang in a museum. Quincy Arcega was a recent Finalist for the Sustainable Arts Grant. She has exhibited locally at Eleanor Harwood, Adobe Books, and Round Weather. Her solo exhibitions include the Bemis Underground in Omaha, Foundry Art Center in St. Louis, CounterPulse, Red Poppy Art House, and Incline Gallery in San Francisco, as well as Gene Space in Shanghai, China.
Artworks
click on images for more detail
