Melissa Cody’s textile artwork boldly remixes motifs from Indigenous myths, common tradition, and her personal life. Born in Arizona and raised within the Navajo custom, the Navajo/Diné artist combines people textile methods with digital explorations in producing patterns and weaves. Together with her first US solo exhibition, Webbed Skies, presently at MoMA PS1, she deliberately ruptures conventional symmetries, creating magnificence out of dysfunction. On this means, she calls into query canonical Euro-American aesthetic beliefs of steadiness and order. Extra broadly, the glitches within the present’s greater than 20 works converse to tradition — and cultural distinction — as a fancy community of interconnections and disruptions, whereas drawing viewers’ consideration to Cody’s private examinations of heritage and belonging.
Cody’s huge lexicon of cultural references ranges from legendary figures to the tasteless company toys she had as a baby. Spider Girl, in “Spider Girl Greets the Daybreak” (2013), and the arched violet bands in “Underneath Cowl of Webbed Skies” (2021) evoke a legendary mountain panorama, whereas “I Am Navajo Barbie” (2012) facilities the sacred determine Ye’ii, woven in a vibrant, simplified sample, which in its naked rendering of a robotic or mascot determine resembles kids’s drawings and strikingly captures a childlike sense of craving inside play.
In “Germantown Sampler” (2011), Cody attracts on the luminous, high-contrast patterning of the Germantown Revival, a Navajo weaving custom developed after a interval of compelled migrations and mass imprisonment often called the Lengthy Stroll (1863–68). In her “sampler,” Cody breaks up the weave’s symmetry by enjoying with colour, switching from a black/orange distinction to a subtler gradation of blue and inexperienced, jettisoning the equilibrium of her visible inspiration. For “White Out” (2012), she leaves a big rectangle on the left facet clean, however for a slim remnant of the weave that fills the work’s complete proper facet. On this means, Cody’s intentionally helter-skelter patterning subverts each perceptual expectations and what it means to protect creative traditions.
Disruptions tackle extra private meanings elsewhere within the present, notably in works devoted to Cody’s father, who suffers from Parkinson’s illness. A trio of works, “Deep Mind Stimulation” (2011), “Dopamine Regression” (2010), and “Coagulation” (2010), poignantly mirror the sickness and its remedy. Within the first, pulsating bands of colour that resemble radial waves change abruptly from chilly to heat and again to chilly, maybe to underline the stark results of neurotransmitters on the mind. In “Coagulation,” the crimson colour “bleeds” into the symmetrical composition, “coagulating” throughout the neat edges separating it from the geometric weave, whereas “Dopamine Regression” represents neuroscience as a research of arcane patterns — right here, dense jagged traces and jumbled designs — powerfully conveying the sensation of an individual straining to chop by means of the psychological noise. In these works, as in the whole present, Cody demonstrates that conventional methods and motifs should not static, however are dynamic bearers of emotional weight.
Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies continues at MoMA PS1 (22–25 Jackson Avenue, Lengthy Island Metropolis, Queens) by means of September 9. The exhibition was organized by Museu de arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and MoMA PS1, and curated by MASP’s Isabella Rjeille and MoMA PS1’s Ruba Katrib.