This essay examines the hybrid space where textiles meet architecture, unraveling national iconographies and insignia through works at the 59th Venice Biennale by artists Simone Leigh and Na Chainkua Reindorf. In installations of glass beads and raffia thatching, respectively, these artists propose a fluid notion of the nation that is personal, gendered, clandestine, and subversive.
Read MoreGallery Wendi Norris’ exhibition Seeking Civilization: Art and Cartography ostensibly questions how mapping practices have been reformatted to reflect changes in citizenship, power, and nationhood. The exhibition draws its frame of reference from Robert Storr’s 1994 exhibition Mapping at MoMA, which included one of the same works featured here. The refrain by seven artists—the majority living within the rapidly shifting geography of the Bay Area—is one which situates us within a complex of overlaid cartographies, which cannot be delineated by the clear partitions and broad strokes of traditional mapping. Instead, these artists transform the flat surface of various maps into rugged terrain, full of fissures and interruptions.
Read MoreDISSOLVE Magazine SF is an online publication focusing on arts criticism and discourse with the aim to foster the work of emerging writers, cultural theorists, and artists that are passionate about attending to the unseen and the unknown.
Dissolve is pleased to share the release of our most recently printed book, The Demise of Alice by Evelyn Grace Vex. Vex is the pen name of Grace Hannah Perez, an author and artist from Southern California. The novel—a noir mystery set against the backdrop of New Orleans in the late 1920s—was edited by Christopher Squier and Jackie Valle and published by Dissolve in hardcover in February 2024.
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