Elijah Wheat Showroom is gleeful to present the textile work of Hope Wang at the Future Fair, May 3-7, 2022. Hope Wang uses hand-weaving, screen-printing, painting, and photography to reproduce architectural “scars” and patterns from common construction materials. Contending with sloppy traces of human activity around sites of industrial labour, her work references building facades that have been eroded, redacted, or defaced. Her weavings consider the ways architectural spaces become artifacts of memory, and thus, how spaces themselves become palimpsests of meaning. She likes to playfully infer that she creates geo-caches of public places she has cried in.

Oscillating between grieving and designing elaborate inside jokes with herself, she didactically creates through meticulous trompe l’oeil screenprints, paintings, and weavings. By focusing on the projected desires born out of that kind of material mimicry, the ‘codes’ of spatial authority, and the personification of our structural environment, Wang uses these representational, non-figurative methods to examine conditions of alienation. 

Considering physically and emotionally taxing manual labour roles, Wang uses these repetitive processes like screen-printing and hand-weaving to package observations of human activity around industrial sites of labour and architectural remnants. While much of these are merely surface level observations about textile and construction industries, Wang also addresses pay inequity and the arbitrary value of labour under capitalism.

Head low and looking down at city sidewalks, Wang reflects in the marks leftover from human’s movement. This public space compels the visual structure of Hope Wang’s interpretive weavings. Yet, a viewer will be confronted with codes of authority: taped off boundaries, traffic cones directing space in parking lots (turned testing grounds in Quarantine), entry/trespassing signs, etc. Throughout 2020 business shutterings, the widespread vacant window fronts barricaded with spray-painted plywood, are among the keen replications and visual depictions of oppressive public structures (and failures) ultimately informing Wang’s most recent textile works where bodies are conspicuously absent, only scars remain.

Hope Wang is a Chicago-based artist, arts facilitator, and poet.

Contending with sloppy traces of human activity around sites of industrial labour, her work considers the ways architectural spaces become artifacts of memory. She likes to joke that she creates geo-caches of public places she has cried in. She hosts and operates LMRM, a floor loom rental studio for Chicago fiber artists. Wang is also a co-organizer of Chicago Textile Week 2019 and 2021, Chicago's first textile exposition featuring a week-long program of events highlighting work spanning interiors, architecture, fine arts, and fashion. She received her BFA (2018) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a 2021 recipient of the gener8tor Art Accelerator Program Grant. She has attended the Digital Weaving Lab Residency at Praxis Fiber Workshop; The Weaving Mill WARP Residency; and Spudnik Press Cooperative Fellowship.