Margo Wolowiec
American, b. 1985
Though we perceive them as paintings, Margo Wolowiec’s works are in fact intricate loom-woven textiles infused with images via dye-sublimation transfer. The process of Wolowiec's intricate hand-woven panels begins with the careful collection of digital images sourced from social media platforms. She uses her own algorithms to build a vast image archive culled from trending geotags and hashtags, which she then cherry-picks and arranges images into careful compositions before transferring the images onto polymer threads through a dye sublimation process. Wolowiec weaves the yarn on a manual loom to create a tapestry to which she sometimes adds a gestural mark. The final textile maintains a grid-like pattern that refers to the square and rectangle formats of the source photographs. The rich tension between her carefully selected internet imagery and her sensual, handmade weavings is just the first thought-provoking dialectic of many. Other productive frictions include: beauty versus politics, information versus knowledge, word versus picture, and the colliding histories of painting, photography, textiles and sculpture.
Submitted by Jessica Silverman



