Terra Tools: Blocks, Clocks, Rocks, & Blades

June 5 – July 17, 2021 
Romer Young Gallery, SF, CA

Terra Tools is an exhibition of textile-based artworks made during the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic. This work continues Curreri’s focus on the collective and connective properties of textiles. Yet it represents new personal shifts, prioritizing hands-on material processes, craft hxstories, and willful downshifts in Time.

The forms in this new work are based on hxstoric American quilt blocks. The motifs are sharp, sawblade, clock-like, and bullet hole type patterns. The blocks become tools for fighting, for remixing inherited traditions, iterative process, and grounding during tough times. The sharp edges of the quilting mix with the soft hand of the fabric. Some of the blocks are small and intimate and one is enlarged to wall-sized proportions; some edges are left raw, others have appendages. A spectrum of natural dyes on velvets, silks, and cotton combine with sequins and digital prints culled from LGBTQ+ archives. Also included in Terra Tools are two recent custom garments designed to hold and evoke specific social justice hxstories.

This work coincides for Curreri with a recent relocation to the Southwest: “The colors are predominantly natural dyes that I'm cooking and harvesting here in NM. Teaching during these “unprecedented times,” I worked with students to harvest local color from our neighborhoods and kitchens: prickly pear, cochineal beetles, chamisa, avocado pits, madder root, and more. Heeding the growing seasons, the smells, and properties of natural color served to model care and engage with concepts of temporal sovereignty.*”  

The artworks in Terra Tools function as proposals, a series of tools to free → time.

*Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Duke University Press, 2017