Accounting for Bleed

This exhibition explores textile iconographies inherited, gifted, found, and bought as constantly slipping impermanent forms that shift and reappear within the artist's life. 

On clothing lines stretching across the gallery Francisco Berlanga’s hand dyed textiles hang, below them the floor is carpeted with a sea of store bought serapes. As the viewer walks over fields of serape their heads are grazed with cochineal dyed cotton depicting icons familiar to the artist, motifs of Mexico that are half formed. Berlanga examines the symbols, icons, and patterns that adorn his memories. These icons include peacock figures on pillows embroidered by his grandmother, withering roses left as offerings on home altars, horizontal lines of colour on serapes used as picnic blankets, and piñatas hung with fabrics from clothing lines. Berlanga takes these icons and reproduces them in cochineal, painted with various mordants that can shift the pigments hue from vibrant reds and pinks, to beyond fuschia, towards plum, and settling in a deep black purple. Exploring the agency of the dye as it becomes an active participant within the textile. Taking the icons painted on and enhancing them, shifting their colour, shape, combining them with other icons as pigments and mordants bleed together creating unexpected combinations. 

Berlanga's textiles hang as reference points to deeply personal iconographies pulled from familial memories and his experiences as a second generation Mexican immigrant. But below them are the store bought serapes, mass produced objects often sighted as the cheap inauthentic reference of Mexico, but Berlanga does not see them as such. They are repetitions of a once-honest form that, at times, still reflect the authenticity of their origins. They are tethering points that the artist once used as the only reference available, finding home in the novelty section of the fabric store. Berlanga questions how the tensions of authenticity might become settled within the bleed of the dye, how the hand embroidered peacock pillows might become intertwined with the infinite horizons found in the machine produced textiles, how the holes in the eyelet cotton might provide sightlines to polyester serapes.