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Through narratives of migration, the artists Shaheer Zazai, Ella Gonzales, and Stina Baudin vividly materialize abstraction\u2019s entanglements in computational and fibre-based histories. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Intervening within global networks of textile production to fashion meditations on diasporic identity, Zazai, Gonzales, and Baudin demonstrate shared affinities with the poetics of Relation articulated by the Martinican poet and philosopher \u00c9douard Glissant. For Glissant, the new forms of belonging forged by migration open up novel possibilities for aesthetic expression. Premised on a decentring of identity, his relational poetics unfolds between self and other, home and elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"Shaheer$
Shaheer Zazai<\/strong>
Zarghoon Carpet<\/em>, 111,8 x 228,6 cm, 2015.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Reminiscent of the intricate patterning of traditional Afghan carpets, the abstract geometries of Shaheer Zazai\u2019s digital art are animated by the serendipity of chance. \u201cI think the key element of abstraction in my work is for the most part not knowing what will happen and what the outcome will be,\u201d he says.^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - All Shaheer Zazai quotations are from the artist\u2019s talk at York University, Toronto, on November 5, 2024.<\/span> His digital practice is itself the improbable outcome of a self-prescribed punishment for excessive screen time. As a New Year\u2019s penance, he typed thousands of dots and spaces into a Word document. But the punishment backfired. Instead of returning the then painter to his easel, this exercise became the catalyst for his ongoing production of works in diverse media\u200a\u2014\u200aall derived from patterns of improvised keystrokes. Using Word\u2019s highlighter function, Zazai imposes rules for transforming this typographic data into dazzling abstractions evocative of the rich vocabulary of Afghan rugs. Initially working on a small scale, Zazai soon set himself the formidable challenge of completing a life-size carpet design within the time constraint of a 40-hour work week. It was while researching the history of Afghan carpets that he came to the realization that rug designs reference the landscape architecture of what he terms \u201cdream gardens.\u201d Like the pulsing geometries of traditional carpets, his abstractions are woven from a cultural reservoir of imagined green spaces, but the algorithmic patterning of traditional designs is always deformed by a stochastic eruption of chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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An ethos of cultivation remains generative for Zazai, who has more recently turned to the production of physical carpets. Wanting to \u201cgive back\u201d to his embattled homeland, which returned to Taliban rule following the withdrawal of international troops in 2021, he instituted a new constraint: \u201cIt has to be made in Afghanistan by Afghan hands.\u201d But remote collaboration with Afghan weavers has proven challenging. Zazai observes that \u201cthere is no button to press\u201d when communicating with labourers beyond the reach of contemporary on-demand production networks. Instead, the carpets emerge from a complex \u201cbroken telephone\u201d process, in which designs composed in Word undergo multiple format migrations before being sent on to a contact in Afghanistan, where they are ultimately redrawn on graph paper. \u201cHighlighted characters eventually become dyed wool knots,\u201d explains Zazai, who embraces the creative license taken by his collaborators. (For security reasons, these women remain anonymous\u200a\u2014\u200afor now.) A striking instance of the serendipity that propels Zazai\u2019s art, the weavers chose to translate some of the diagonals in his patterns into florets recalling the garden origins of Afghan carpet motifs. Emerging through the multiple dislocations wrought by format migration and collaboration at a distance, the formal digressions of Zazai\u2019s weavers are reminiscent of Glissant\u2019s poetics of Relation. In particular, their wandering threads vividly materialize the aesthetics of \u201cerrantry\u201d that Glissant associates with the tendency of migration to set stable coordinates of belonging adrift.^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - \u00c9douard Glissant, Poetics of Relation<\/em>, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 11.<\/span> This mobile condition is conducive to dialogical modes of relating that celebrate the in-between<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"\"$
Shaheer Zazai<\/strong>
2PW3PH MSMAX C N1<\/em>, 111,8 x 167,6 cm, 2020.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The Filipina Canadian artist Ella Gonzales also harnesses the deep time of fibre media to explore themes of personal and cultural memory in works that synthesize abstraction and computational design. Abstraction is operative in Gonzalez\u2019s practice as a dynamic interplay of opacity and transparency. Employing translucent pi\u00f1a<\/em> fabrics woven from pineapple leaves as supports for her expanded painting practice, Gonzales constructs what she terms \u201cfurnishings.\u201d^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - All Ella Gonzales quotations from a \u00adconversation with the author on November 26, 2024.<\/span> Taking the poet and essayist Lisa Robertson\u2019s writings on \u201csoft architecture\u201d as a point of departure, Gonzales became interested in how spaces register the movements of their occupants, acting as immersive portraits. These reflections on space as an index of bodies in transit inform the overlapping planes of Gonzales\u2019s architectural abstractions, whose layered interiors memorialize homes once occupied by her and her family on their trajectory of migration from Saudi Arabia, where she was born, to their current home in Canada. Using CAD modelling software, she reconstructs these transient spaces from photographs and memory. Her 3D virtual models yield semi-transparent digital layers that she superimposes to produce geometric abstractions whose overlapping planes evoke architectural depth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Ella$
Ella Gonzales<\/strong>
Between Gestures & Gestures Between<\/em>, installation view, Unit 17, Vancouver, 2024.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Unit 17, Vancouver<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Gonzales credits her seamstress grandmother with introducing her to the traditional Filipino fabrics that remain central to her practice today, including jusi<\/em> silks, originally woven from banana leaf fibres. When staying abroad with family, Gonzales\u2019s grandmother was in the habit of repaying her hosts\u2019 hospitality by refreshing their interiors\u200a\u2014\u200asewing everything from curtains to tablecloths\u200a, \u200aall from a single set of fabrics. This resourceful use of textiles infuses Gonzales\u2019s A Room\u2019s Proportion<\/em> (2025), a site-specific installation produced for YYZ Artists\u2019 Outlet, whose curtain format literalizes her paintings\u2019 associations with home d\u00e9cor while serving as a metaphoric screen for the projection of memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Ella$
Ella Gonzales<\/strong>
A Room\u2019s Proportion, basement<\/em>, installation view, YYZ Artists\u2019 Outlet, Toronto, 2025.
Photo: LF Documentation, courtesy of the artist & Unit 17, Vancouver<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The migratory spaces of Gonzales\u2019s virtual interiors are also shaped by the mobile topology of the cargo boxes that were used by her family to ship furnishings and textiles from the Philippines. Gonzales is fascinated by the cargo box\u2019s capacity to serve as a carrier for more abstract indications of migration when flattened into a two-dimensional surface. The idiosyncratic wooden supports that she constructs to frame her paintings are informed by this malleable potential. She likens the aptly titled Furnishing <\/em>(2023) to \u201ca coffee table\u201d; other works, wall-mounted on hinges, recall doors that beckon viewers to enter her imaginative worlds. Where Gonzales\u2019s chalky scrims allow light to pass through, they behave like gently glowing screens. Her most recent work develops these allusions into a material theatre of transparency and opacity inspired by the writings of Glissant, who proposed the notion of opacity as a form of respect for the other, one resistant to the Western compulsion to render difference transparent to the colonial gaze. Reminiscent of the virtual layers of her 3D models, Gonzales\u2019s Sleeve: which cannot be reduced<\/em> (2024) powerfully materializes Glissant\u2019s observation that \u201copacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics\u201d by lining milky polyethylene sheeting with her signature acrylic-painted pi\u00f1a<\/em> and jusi<\/em> silks.^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - Glissant, Poetics of Relation<\/em>, 190.<\/span> For Gonzales, opacity can operate as a powerful mode of abstraction for negotiating the complexities of identity. \u201cAn identity is such an abstract thought,\u201d she observes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"\"$
Stina Baudin<\/strong>
Data Studies 1.1 Caribbean-Canadian migrations 1986\/96<\/em>, 2022, installation view, Toronto Biennial of Art, 2024.
Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Haitian Canadian artist Stina Baudin weaves narratives of Black migration into richly textured data visualizations. Initially studying to be a social worker in Montr\u00e9al, she had a chance encounter with a women\u2019s weaving collective while bicycling in Cambodia that proved transformative. Although unfamiliar with looms and unable to communicate with her hosts, she was entranced by the complex gestural choreography of their labour. After relocating to Germany in 2014, Baudin became increasingly curious about contemporary textile arts; she later studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels, where she learned how to build her own upright loom. Speaking to me from her studio at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in suburban Detroit, Baudin shows off her latest custom loom. \u201cI like the idea of building your loom yourself,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause then you can go anywhere and just build it. It\u2019s cost-efficient and a skill that you can teach others. It\u2019s also accessible.\u201d ^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - All Stina Baudin quotations from a \u00adconversation with the author on November 28, 2024.<\/span> The loom emerges from Baudin\u2019s itinerant practice as the nimble motor for an errant aesthetics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Inspired by the visionary infographics of the sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, Baudin ingeniously reimagines the loom\u2019s potential to function as a data processor for weaving historical statistics about Black migration patterns into ravelled abstractions. Data Studies 1.1 Caribbean-Canadian migrations 1986\/96 <\/em>(2022) translates data harvested from Statistics Canada records into raster-like tiles of cotton and linen. An accompanying key elucidates the graph-like check weave of this work as a cross index of migrants\u2019 Caribbean countries of origin and their settlement patterns in Canada. Reflecting on the role of abstraction in her work, Baudin observes, \u201cI think I\u2019m just really interested in how to tell a story at the end of the day.\u201d Her textiles harness the abstract idioms of data and archival documentation as narrative resources for diasporic storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her spirit of restless inquiry ultimately led Baudin to question the logic of one-to-one correspondence between data and design that informed Data Studies 1.1<\/em>. The opaque visualization of Internal Algorithms (listen to your ancestors, they have all the answers) <\/em>(2023) was inspired by her navigation of the ambiguities embedded within statistical records that sometimes collapse migrants\u2019 countries of origin into vague labels such as \u201cWest Indies.\u201d The more allusive relationship with source data expressed by the rhythmic monochromy of this work recalls the coded messages embedded in historical Black quilts and hair-braiding practices. In particular, Baudin found herself meditating on statisticians\u2019 use of generic placeholders such as \u201cetc.\u201d and \u201cand related.\u201d The latter term led Baudin to recognize that the diasporic narratives she was elaborating are implicated in a multiplicity of interconnected histories, large and small. \u201cI realized this idea \u2018and related\u2019 is really powerful because everything is related to something,\u201d she observes. Propelled by this awareness of the inherent relationality of globalization\u2019s wide-reaching effects, her recent excavations of denim\u2019s material linkages to histories of slavery and environmental degradation unfold a poignant poetics of Relation reminiscent of Glissant\u2019s writings on the errant condition of diasporic identities and their potential to spawn mobile networks of meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Stina$
Stina Baudin<\/strong>
Internal Algorithms (listen to your ancestors, they have all the answers)<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: permission de l’artiste<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In Data Studies 2.1: We shall thank you to carefully examine and fit<\/em> (2023), Baudin visualizes this dense field of material connections through a transformative scrutiny of the visual economies of commercial denim. Thrift-store jeans sourced in suburban Detroit are deconstructed into a broken lattice evocative of that city\u2019s frayed street grid or, perhaps, a data-fied Mondrian. Rather than imposing external statistics onto recycled apparel, however, Baudin allows her materials to speak for themselves in this work by repurposing texts imprinted on brand-name fabrics. Exposing words embedded in interior layers of clothing that are ordinarily withheld from visibility, she prompts viewers to reflect on the material linkages among denim, racialized blue-collar labour, and the blues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leveraging abstraction to materialize social histories of fabric production, Baudin\u2019s work participates in a broader rethinking of abstraction\u2019s potential to visualize the intersections between migration stories and computational design. The textile-based works of Zazai and Gonzales are equally emblematic of the computational resources mobilized by this contemporary aesthetics of errant abstraction, from the pulsing contours of symbolic landscapes composed in Word to virtual memory spaces drafted in CAD. Weaving generative tensions between pattern and chance, as well as between transparency and opacity, all three artists exemplify abstraction\u2019s capacity to manifest personal and collective narratives of dislocation and remembrance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
With a PhD in art history from the University of Toronto, Adam Lauder is an adjunct professor at OCAD University and has taught courses at the University of Toronto. In 2018, he organized an exhibition of Rita Letendre\u2019s public art at YYZ Artists\u2019 Outlet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Contemporary artists are unravelling the threads that connect abstraction to computation and textiles. Recently on view at the National Gallery of Canada, the travelling exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction proposes an ambitious counter-history of abstraction rooted \u201cin the everyday world\u201d of fibre media and [NOTE count=1]self-fashioning.[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Lynne Cooke, \u201cModernist Histories: Braided, Interlaced, and Aligned,\u201d in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,<\/em> ed.\u00a0Lynne Cooke (Washington, DC and Chicago: National Gallery of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2023), 3.[\/REF] Long neglected by art historians as the product of \u201cwomen\u2019s work,\u201d the warp and weft of textiles are finally gaining recognition as a decisive point of origin for that enduring symbol of\u00a0abstraction, the grid.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":268397,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7491],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[832],"artistes":[7459,7487,7441],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-268412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-114-abstractions-en","auteurs-adam-lauder","artistes-ella-gonzales-en","artistes-shaheer-zazai-en","artistes-stina-baudin-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268412"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268416,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268412\/revisions\/268416"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268412"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=268412"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=268412"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=268412"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=268412"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=268412"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=268412"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=268412"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=268412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}