Hope Wang

Face Prostrate, Temples Kissing The Baked Facade, 2
handwoven cotton and wool
70 x 43 in.

My work explores how the dissonance of representation and its illusion gestures toward displacement in the same way bodies wander through and occupy space. Drawn to architectural scars as metaphors for negotiations of belonging, I use installation, painting, and weaving to create simulations of photographed facades I encounter. Through creating reflections of spaces in material that confuse its authenticity as either image or object, my work questions familiarity as sincerity or as artifice.

I’m interested in shifting visualization and reimagining expectations of architectural surfaces and spatial experiences. By installing painted reproductions of space in the site my work references, both the painting and the painted rely on the other to be understood. I also process image as material object by combining and fracturing images of architecture through weaving. The loom becomes an apparatus for confounding image with surface and structure of woven cloth, producing simulacra of the photographed space. Yet it fails in completely selling such illusions.

In mediating site and sight, the act of representing my surrounding spaces and signifiers engages a sense of place but also calls into question the sites of everyday existence and interactions.

I am both the skeptic and the nostalgic body, one longing for intimacy and perhaps only finding it in the liminal spaces that belong to nothing in particular.

© Hope Wang