The Armory Show, 2022
Diana Guerrero-Maciá: SLEEPING GIANT
Booth F11

Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to participate in the 2022 presentation of The Armory Show with Chicago-based gallery artist Diana Guerrero-Maciá.  The gallery will be located in the Focus section of The Armory Show, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In summary, the 2022 theme “examines the intersectionality of issues surrounding the environment, focusing on personal and political climates as they interact with race and gender.” Artists in this year’s exhibition foreground South-South ecologies, introducing a transcultural conversation around art production grounded on abstract, representational and conceptual approaches.

This solo booth presentation by gallery artist Diana Guerrero-Maciá, titled “Sleeping Giant,” includes four new large-scale paintings, an immersive wall installation of 36 collages on paper, printed vinyl tiles scanned from the artist’s own collection of textiles covering the floor of the booth and a sculptural installation featuring a Hans Wegner style folding chair, a pillow made by the artist’s mother, a shipping palette and other personal items from the artists upbringing and studio practice. All the works in the booth begin with the basic structure of a nine patch: a fundamental quilt block pattern that organizes space in quilt making originating in the beginning of the nineteenth century. This allows Guerrero-Maciá to drive much more complex forms from a basic pattern, while combining the language of abstraction with materiality.

Within this language, Diana Guerrero-Maciá’s artworks point to social and political conflicts as felt through the material existence of textiles and found objects. From the materiality of these items, the artist pointedly drives color and forms to the front of the viewer’s consciousness as conduits of a codified language. The vehicle for this is Abstraction which generates a delivery process that is simultaneously complex and ambivalent. Ultimately, here, the textiles operate as exiles on an abstract field opening up riffs among non-specific visual references.

This cohesive set of artworks presented in different physical forms allow Guerrero-Maciá to offer a seamless experience that questions both art-histographies and inter-personal everyday dynamics. The exploration of the language of abstraction through color and form alongside the socio-political elements of materiality create a tangible sense of place. From the sun, to horizon lines, resting hands, migrating geese and burlap the physicality of these ideas is detectable, yet also assert a “yes/and” rather than an “either/or” binary.