Isabella Cuglievan Tamara Gonzales

The Pit Palm Springs

May 28 - July 9, 2022

The Pit is pleased to present Tamara Gonzales & Isabella Cuglievan, a two-person exhibition featuring paired paintings by the New York-based artist and Lima-based artist respectively. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery’s Palm Springs location from May 28th to July 9th with an opening reception on May 28th.

A tender relationship to nature is what guides both artists in their practices. That, and their shared affinity for textiles—which go hand-in-hand in this exhibition. Cuglievan is struck by the link between textiles and nature. She refers to the similarities between patterns found in Shipibo-Conibo and Ainu embroideries, for instance, or Wari and Navajo weavings. These cultures, “separated by time and geography, and despite all their unique differences” notes Cuglievan, “have a shared language in these elemental motifs that come from nature.”

For Gonzales, it’s about what nature is always revealing and how to translate the worthwhile quality of its beauty through a painting. “It’s about what’s possible,” she says, “if all our humanity turns its attention towards preservation.”

Cuglievan’s kaleidoscopic abstract paintings have a machine-like precision at first glance, but the reality is quite the opposite. It takes a careful human hand, a single wide brush, and very, very thin, unforgiving layers. Her process, in a way, translates the language of textiles into a painting. Cuglievan thinks of it as akin to the tradition of quilting. Working in tiny sections, brushstrokes are “stitched” together, from a tabletop rather than an easel, and she doesn’t see her progress until the very end when the quilt is opened up—or in Cuglievan’s case, when she finally hangs the painting upright. Acrylic ink, watercolor, and gouache glide across paper (and in some pieces, flashe on canvas) in intrepid, but symmetrical technicolor movements that make the words ‘erratic’ and ‘meticulous’ feel as though they should go together. Curved strokes give way to triangular negative space, rainbow arches often stay as they are or morph into full circles, and others of them run across the canvas in rivulets. Weaving looms, vintage jello molds, and the light-up tracks of the groovy locomotive from the Soul Train graphic lovingly come to mind.

When setting out to work in her studio, Gonzales was thinking about tarot decks, divinatory rituals, Loteria cards, macro sites on Instagram, and flower pressings. “The Loteria cards have been in my psyche forever,” she says, “there’s a framing and a very simple image in the middle.” This framing device with a central figure, also found in Tarot cards (which her Wiccan mother introduced at an early age) used to creep into Gonzales’ work unintentionally, but over time it’s become a more conscious approach. The serpentine plants at the center of some pieces are a shorthand for the snake as a symbol of energy healing. A bowing Blue Lotus is inspired by the Kundalini yoga movement of the seventies. The textured borders of each painting either mimic textiles or introduce fabrics like lace. The occasional circular floral-print swatches are evocative of a gentle patch-job on a pair of ripped jeans. Acrylic and pastel flowers call to Gonzales’ childhood of growing up in Madera, California, where she’d take to the fields with her family during super bloom season and press their delicate findings. These days, she experiences a similar wonder via macro sites on Instagram. Whether it’s a capybara, a little bug, or a leaf, you’re looking at your small phone, but to her, it’s like looking through a microscope. “It’s revealing the whole world in this little spec,” she says, “Instagram is the perfect delivery for reminding us that we’re both the center of the universe and non-existent.”

Neither Cuglievan or Gonzales has been to Palm Springs, but each of them possesses an undeniable kinship to the desert. Cuglievan grew up between desert landscapes: her birth city Lima and Máncora, a desert outpost on the Northern coast of Peru; and Gonzales’ work conjures up the curative energy that California spiritual seekers have always flocked to that arid setting in search of. On the occasion of her first visit, Gonzales will bring her fitting color palette of pastels at dusk and, Cuglievan, her striking spectrum reminiscent of the triumphant poppies, festive tiki cocktails, and charismatic retro hotels that stand resplendent against the otherwise neutral landscape of the Sonoran Desert.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@the-pit.la.