Reimagining Mosaic

Transformative Arts X Art 1307 presents Reimagining Mosaic with artists Sharon Barnes, Lisa Bartleson, Joan Wulf and Shipiba artists Celestina Ángulo Chavez and Lauriana Rojas Martinez.

This exhibition celebrates the ongoing collaboration between jill moniz and Cynthia Penna, across projects, continents and visual languages.

Mosaic is considered a pattern of diverse elements or colors that in aggregate form a coherent whole. Each artist in Reimagining Mosaic works in this way the create vivid imagery in sculptural forms, ephemera and textiles that in this case tell stories about women. Together, these visual narratives describe the diverse ways women labor to integrate their bodies and ideas with challenges and representations they encounter.

Penna notes, “the exhibition…is characterized by a distinct ability to give the stories that are visualized a powerful emotional content. The materials used by the artists are chosen, gathered, handled, torn apart, woven and recomposed in order to preserve a both collective and individual memory, and to visualize individual intimate experiences.”

The exhibition is an interpretation on an ancient practice made contemporary. Comprised of

“personal stories about a formerly fragmented Self that has been recomposed; stories of a collective memory to safeguard and transmit; stories of personal identities and stories of ‘togetherness’, of community” these works offer portals, perspectives and possible futures built out of enduring elements of the past.

Reimagining Mosaic celebrates how art can shape meaning and the environments that we need to interpret and survive life – histories, politics, aesthetics, colonialism, maternal care and love.

The stories these artists share with viewers are translations from written and oral traditions that Penna states “[have] thus preserved and saved whole cultures from oblivion, and it is no coincidence that in many ancient cultures it was women who took care of transmitting the knowledge, traditions and rituals of the community, and this has been true of both small villages or large ethnicities.”  

“Regardless of how we want to define and understand the concept of “mosaic”, it is a composition or recomposition whose significance is to be found in the recomposed whole. Through mosaic art we hope to “recompose” our individual existence or our feeling of community, and to achieve this we will in any case rely on Art, which above all is, and remains, an expression of Beauty,” (Penna, 2023). 

Reimaging Mosaic opens at Transformative Arts on June 3, 2023, with an opening reception from 4-7pm. The exhibition runs through July 29, 2023 at 410 S Spring Street Los Angeles, California 90013.