Interdisciplinary artist Tanya Aguiñiga stages a live performance on the Armory’s Instagram this week, activating her current sculptural installation, which had opened in the days just before quarantine began. As she is known for her practice merging textile-making, sculpture and performative collaboration, the exhibition centers around a large-scale work titled Ejercicios en Entendimiento (Exercises in Understanding) — a sculpture interpretive of a weaving loom that both spans and divides the main gallery floor.

This Wednesday, June 3, Aguiñiga will finally get to activate and complete the piece as intended, as she enacts a live weaving performance using her body as the giant loom’s shuttle, to weave a wall within the gallery, using strips of cotton hand-dyed with a pigment made from “pulverized” rust fragments scraped from the US/Mexico border wall.

Aguiñiga describes this action as, “an attempt to learn through my body. My body is the vessel (shuttle). My body carries, pushes, and pulls the weft (fiber) over and under the warp (the rope dividing the gallery space).” In this way of empathetic phenomenology, Aguiñiga brings together aesthetically serene and politically charged ideas about destruction, creation, migration, reemergence, separation, connection, the body and the literal and poetic textures of our social fabric.

Armory’s Instagram, Wednesday, June 3, 4-4:30pm; armoryarts.org.

 

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