Full-cycle management of Lena Wolff’s artist residency at Local Language, including artist selection, curatorial collaboration, scheduling, budget oversight, creative direction, and exhibition planning. The residency was guided by a collaborative approach to fabrication and design, with ongoing consultation on materials, processes, and production, and supporting the evolution of individual artworks from early ideation to fabrication.
Wolff’s residency focused on the visual language of American quilt patterns as a symbolic link between past and present, the personal and the political. With curatorial support, she created a new body of work—hand-cast plaster drawings and large-scale low-relief wood sculptures—centered around the geometry of lyric quilt motifs.
Each plaster artwork is hand cast and carved with the cnc router. The geometric design is rooted in the iconography of American quilt patterns; an abstracted pattern and symbol of the visual language, passed down for centuries and across communities linking the past and the future, the personal and the political.
The low-relief wood sculptures stems out of a series created over the past decade that bring iconic American quilt patterns into the realm of sculpture. These pieces are the most monumental of her translations of quilt motifs and are part of her broader practice in which she regularly translates, adapts, and metamorphosizes a lexicon of quilt patterns into unexpected mediums and material outcomes.