HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of All That We Carry, an exhibition by New York-based textile artist Carolina Jiménez. Marking Jiménez’s debut solo presentation, the exhibition comes on the heels of her recent residency at the Albers Foundation and will feature her modular textile works, which she refers to as woven paintings.
Reflecting a careful calibration between color and form, Jiménez’s woven paintings are constructed from sections of woven and unwoven yarn colored in jewel-toned hues using natural and synthetic dyes. The precise geometry of these texturally nuanced grids and vaguely topographic abstractions is informed by Jiménez’s background in architecture and study of the weaving techniques of Mexico, her parent’s country of origin. Many of the forms she employs derive from traditional clothing designs, including the tunic-like Huipil and Cinta, a kind of woven belt. For Jiménez, these clothing typologies are both markers of localized knowledge and reflections of ancestral lineage, with many of the specific styles of weaving and decoration passed down through matrilineal lines. Expanding on this context, the artist conceives of her textiles as intimate records of memory and begins each work by locating a particular reference in her past. In the monumental work, Alone (with you) at the Pond, Jiménez responds to her recollections of the pond on the property of the Albers Foundation in Connecticut. Other works in the exhibition are inspired by her synesthetic explorations of remembered scents and feelings, especially as they arise around people of special importance to her.
Jiménez’s woven paintings operate as a taxonomy of material gestures: dyed, stretched, folded, loose, rolled, bundled, unraveling, propped against or pinned to the wall, stacked, or crumpled in a heap. These gestures point to the utilitarian function of textiles, reminding us of the ways garments are worn, repaired, and then cast off, as well as their protective possibilities, whether used as layers for warmth or swaddling for a newborn baby. But these mutable qualities additionally suggest how textiles may be understood as surrogates for our own bodies and subjectivities. Through their wrinkles and creases, frayed edges, and processes of making and unmaking, they are our second skins, correspondingly inscribed with indexical markers of our personal and cultural inheritances. “My practice acts as a tether to the past and present narratives of diasporic migration,” Jiménez has said. “While the works are abstract, they can be understood as love letters to Rosa Mexicano, sweet mangoes and kind women on the street, to the dappled light under a jacaranda tree, and a mother’s embrace. They are meditations on my motherland and the traditions that bind me to it.”
-- Kiko Aebi
Carolina Jiménez (b. 1991, Riverside, CA) received her BArch from Syracuse University (2014) and an MFA in Textile Design at Rhode Island School of Design (2018). She has held solo and group exhibitions internationally including Lobster Club, Los Angeles, CA; Alison Bradley Projects, New York, NY; JO-HS, Mexico City, Mexico; Bainbridge Museum of Art, Bainbridge, WA; and RISD Museum, Providence, RI. Her grants and awards include the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency, Bethany, CT; Museum Art and Design Artist Fellowship, New York, NY; Casa Lu Residency, Mexico City, Mexico; and Etvernal Residency, Brooklyn, NY. Jiménez lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Kiko Aebi is the Katz Curator at the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine. She previously held curatorial positions in the Departments of Drawings & Prints and Painting & Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she developed exhibitions including Jack Whitten: The Messenger (opening March 2025), Ed Ruscha / Now Then (2023) and Cézanne Drawing (2021).
