2024 EXHIBITION

Stitch, Thread, Grid: Weaving Everyday Objects

Hangama Amiri

Opening Friday, September, 20 for a brief preview celebrating the Larsen Textile Award and New York Textile Month, the exhibit returns in Spring 2025.

Hangama Amiri holds an MFA from Yale University where she graduated in 2020 from the Painting and Printmaking Department. She received her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences (2015-2016). Her recent exhibitions include Reminiscence II (2024) at T293 Gallery, Italy; Circle of Friends (2024) at Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Quiet Resistance (2023) at Moenchehaus Museum Goslar, Germany; Rumi (2023) at Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, ON; A Homage to Home (2023) at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (2023), Sharjah, UAE. Amiri works predominantly in textiles to examine notions of home, as well as how gender, social norms, and larger geopolitical conflict impact the daily lives of women, both in Afghanistan and in the diaspora. Continuing to use textiles as the medium, Amiri searches to define, explore, and question these spaces. The figurative tendency in her work is due to her interest in the power of representation, especially of those objects that are ordinary to our everyday life, such as a passport, a vase, or celebrity postcards.

Artist Statement

During a visit to LongHouse in the late summer of 2023, Amiri took time to observe, learn, and walk the gardens. She immersed herself in the beauty of Jack Lenor Larsen’s world - his home, collection of art, and garden landscape - enjoying the sound and light that Larsen enveloped his life in. Amiri found it a privilege as an artist to connect in this profound way; transcending time and sharing knowledge of the history of fabric art, dyeing, applique, and collage - finding similarities in taste, color, texture, and painting applique in Larsen's work. Amiri was inspired to take this opportunity in her practice to create fabric works that mesh two voices into one. She brings her textile pieces to LongHouse to be seen and to speak, respond, and interact with its contemporary architecture.

In this exhibition, Stitch, Thread, Grid: Weaving Everyday Objects, her five medium-to-large scale textiles encompass fabric applique and painting as well as hand embroidery on chiffon. Her work is a testimony to Jack Lenor Larsen's extraordinary love for global textile traditions, taking inspiration from Central Asian wrapped Ikat-prints, Afghan handmade rugs, Thailand’s silk weaving, Nigeria’s silk-screen printing, and Bandhani’s tie-dyeing in India. Larsen was not only enthusiastic about learning other methods of weaving, printing, and dyeing from abroad, but also about learning from local communities the traditional ways of making fabric, weaving, and unique distant practices, as these countries offered him endless sources of inspiration. As a refugee Afghan Canadian artist, Hangama Amiri's world has also inspired a search of fabrics, objects, and textiles that are familiar to her cultural background of migration. She brings fabrics from her home country Afghanistan, Pakistan's linen, cotton, silk, and polyesters, Ikat-prints from Central Asia, block-dye fabrics from Saudi Arabia, and colorful silk saris from South Asia. Bringing an amalgamation of Larsen fabrics with her own collection of fabric from her studio, which she learned from, smelled, touched, wore, and lived in, has added many dimensions of depth to her practice and expanded her notion of color, texture, pattern making, and enabled her to learn traditional culturally distinct embroidery. This exploration and exhibition continually enhances her admiration for and celebration of the history that’s being reconciled.

Courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto

The Dinner Table, 2024
Denim, cotton, chiffon, linen, muslin, silk, dye canvas, polyester, guaze, velvet, mesh polyester and Jack Lenor Larsen fabrics
77.5 x 55 inches
Collection of the Artist

Still-Life with Ceramics and Rudy Autio's Untitled (Lovers), 2024
Muslin, silk, cotton, polyester, chiffon and linen
46.5 x 51 inches
Collection of the Artist

Still-Life with Glasses and Jack's Afghan Fabric Collection, 2024
Cotton, chiffon, muslin, linen and acrylic paint on canvas and fabric
47 x 47 inches
Collection of the Artist

Chiffon Peice I, 2024
Hand-painted with ink flow on silk chiffon
96 x 64 inches
Collection of the Artist

Chiffon Peice II, 2024
Hand-painted with ink flow on silk chiffon96 x 64 inchesCollection of the Artist