January 14 - February 4

Opening reception Saturday, January 14, 6-8pm

Cristina Victor
Tender Downshift

In Tender Downshift, I present a collection of three bodies of works that explore my relationship to design, language, and contradiction. The deep introspection inherently experienced through the pandemic offered me an opportunity to essentially downshift, allowing for a questioning and play that my previous pace of life didn’t make available, or rather, I didn’t know how to create for myself. I had the privilege of being a student to the late and great artist Carlos Villa at the San Francisco Art Institute where he embedded in his students to always ask ourselves, “The Who and The What For?”. How I answered that question, my approach to making art, and my relationship to my art practice have and are all still experiencing a shift. The three bodies of work I present in Tender Downshift contain research, eulogies, chistes, subverted vexillology, and quantum hugs in the form of functional ceramics. All pieces have a deep consideration for design as a language.


Sabia Ceramics Collection

Sabia Collection is a line of functional clay works I designed and made through the pandemic. Forced to halt my nomadic life, the physicality of clay and vast learning potential truly carried me through the difficulties of isolation both personally and financially. I began by making custom pieces for friends and fellow artists as a way of offering a quotidian vessel of warmth in each other's forced absence. Communing over food and drink as essential rituals was deeply missed during this time. The series displayed in Tender Downshift contains one of each piece and is made with local Oregon clay from the Rogue River.


Membrana

Working with remnants of previous textile projects as well as materials donated by local makers in Charleston, I expanded my study of the cane weaving pattern into a large-scale installation. Commonly known for its use in furniture design, the origins of the pattern are contested. My relationship to cane weaving is one of nostalgia rooted in memory of my elders as well as their homes and communing spaces. The pattern felt personal and naively traced to the Caribbean, yet its history is expansive—it is found in Egyptian tombs, 17th century England, India, the Philippines, Portugal, Bauhaus, and is experiencing a resurgence today. As a pattern design that challenges authenticity, I am using this installation to add to its lineage while also creating an archive.


Vexi Salon Wall

As an avid vexillologist, through My Story Is My Flag project I teach and advocate for new flag design as a form of empowerment—encouraging versatile representations of the human experience. The collection of pieces presented here are made with the remnants of my projects and display my play with subverting the rules within vexillology to be autoethnography.


Artist Bio

Cristina Victor is a Cuban-American artist whose making always stems from the hyphen. Her interdisciplinary practice materializes storytelling, meditations on the failure and power of language, auto-ethnography, and critiques the framing of identity by mass media outlets. Using textiles, sculpture, installation, and public engagement she is committed to creating and facilitating generative exchanges about the complexities of our collective and individual human experience. Vexillology, analogue graphic design and archiving act as foundational threads in her translations. Her concern for access, balances her formal object making and public engagement projects.

She received her AA from the New World School of the Arts, Her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently based in Charleston, South Carolina and is a Professor at the College of Charleston and a member of the artist collective, Studio Union.