CassanDra Mayela

Works in Gress

December 8th, 2022 - January 26th, 2023

Press Release:

JO-HS and Olympia are proud to collaborate and present Works In Gress, a solo exhibition of tapestries created over the course of the last two years by Cassandra Mayela. The exhibition highlights Mayela’s ongoing Maps of Displacement - a participatory series of site-specific installations created through repurposing Venezuelan immigrants' clothes to create tapestries that evoke one of the largest modern-day refugee crises. 

For the past 2 years, Mayela has been collecting clothing from Venezuelan immigrants that have relocated in different parts of the U.S. and the world. She asks for something that represents them or has a connection with their migratory process. These works are dependent on the collection process itself and, oftentimes getting people involved has proven to be hard as for some, reliving their experiences can be quite painful.

By working within a site-specific framework, the tapestries connect with the specificities of the location studied through material, scale, and pallet. Each piece opens a repository of personal and social experiences of diaspora, blurring the lines between artifact and contemporary sculptural and textile practices.

Installation Views:

Cassandra Mayela (b. Caracas 1989) is a self-taught textile artist who has lived in NY since 2014 when she forcedly migrated from Venezuela. She is curious about clothing’s story-telling capacities and is particularly interested in how migration affects one’s identity and ideas of belonging. Through research, conversations, audience participation, and engaging with textiles and collected and found material, she creates community-oriented work that informs how fundamental changes in fabric can affect one’s perception of identity, highlighting new waves of empowerment. 

Her work has been exhibited at Vacation Gallery (2019), La Salita (2020), Acompi/ NARS Foundation (2021), Olympia Gallery (2021) and JO-HS (2022).  She has been a fellow and artist in residence at NADA House, Amant and Succurro.