Plastic on the Sofa: a Roots family show with Christina Warzecha, phia lynne, & Talia Kimberly Wright

Continuing our 20th anniversary programming, we are ecstatic to open a show featuring three former Roots staff members, curated by our Program Director, **Bobby Luck**. Through the ritual of domesticy, we as humans are in constant conversation with our ancestors in a sort of time-honoured parallel play. We create home within or alongside others in a mimic of a gestural culture learned from centuries of interpersonal consideration. Through obscuring the corporeal, the artists attempt to strip away the temporal aspects of connecting and disconnecting from loved ones. This abstraction of moments maps out a geography of negative space, finding what has been left behind within the shifting matter of our environments. Though a recreation of an occurrence cannot strip time away enough to fall back into a memory or moment completely, echoes of our kin's actions seep through our own hands, like an image fading around the edge into something new. **Christina Warzecha** uses color, space, and texture to build vignettes that explore how processing trauma can change the truth of memory. She encourages unpredictability and a sense of play in her work, creating fluid compositions that capture the wistful yearning for the safety and innocence of childhood. Similar to the coping mechanisms applied to more difficult moments from the past, she abstracts memory into fragmented feelings and forms. **phia lynne's** work encapsulates physical and ontological sanctuary through observation of the corporeal altar, considering how the most mundane evidences of being are weighted with remnants of memory. Archival images of black domesticity invoke a nuanced sensibility to a racialized relationship to love, loss, and desire related to interiority and propriety. Using non-archival materials, phia draws upon time as a medium and collaborator. Their work beckons an intimate, haptic exchange between itself and its viewer—a step closer, a crouch, a peek from below. Utilizing ekphrastic poetics, illegible imagery, and olfactory engagement, their work calls to recognize the scent of a homeland, the whistles of an ancestor, and the tender embrace of a distant love. Utilizing memory, word, and material object, the work of **Talia Kimberly Wright** aims to bridge the gap between the ancestral, traditional, and regenerated lives of African Americans both affected by the Great Migration and across the African diaspora. As a poetry and prose writer with a strong foundation in speculative fiction, she is interested in the ways physicality aids us in tactile processing. By creating objects using textile, ceramics, paper, or paint, she is able to speak life into written words on the page. In other words, she aims to bring storytelling to the front of her practice by creating and providing physical examples, experiences, and textures that represent a journey––a way to process intergenerational movement, healing, and resolve.