Kayla Mattes: Memesis

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Memesis, a solo exhibition of woven works by Los Angeles-based artist Kayla Mattes, who brings a modern sensibility and wit to the traditional art of weaving. Her handwoven tapestries investigate digital forms of expression, drawing from internet memes, symbols, and texts to convey the pervasive anxieties of contemporary life. She tackles themes of environmental crisis, unchecked capitalism, and political upheaval with a humor that allows space for processing and acknowledgement. Mattes marries the grid-based images built out of warp and weft with the pixelated grid of the screens that mediate so much contemporary interaction, furthering the long interconnected history of weaving and technology.

Mattes’s compositions pull inspiration from the bold colors and chaotic aesthetics of the early internet, which she utilizes as a structure for integrating symbols, viral memes, and news of the present day. Her project is archival in nature; she transforms the ephemeral and non-physical, preserving them in weavings that are emphatically grounded and tactile. Mattes archives the evolving interface design and fleeting touchstones of our digital lives. The source material – common signs and symbols, memes – is often overlooked or dismissed as unserious, yet in an increasingly digital world this mode of communication becomes ever more central to our self-expression. Fittingly, tapestry as an artform has long been used to communicate political ideas and to document the current moment, and Mattes brings this history screaming into the 21st century.

Mattes’s works begin as drawings, which are translated into Photoshop and enhanced with appropriated symbols and imagery sourced online or from photos of advertisements and signage found in the real world. The final digitally collaged image is then projected and transcribed onto paper as a tapestry cartoon, which is placed behind the warps as a guide while weaving. Weaving happens on one of two floor looms from the 1970s, the larger of which can accommodate works up to 75 inches in width. Mattes utilizes warp and weft to control the resolution in her images, often using hand-dyed yarns of different gauges to achieve varied effects. She also experiments with materials to create texture or three-dimensional elements, as in the fuzzy pink scrunchies in … Baby One More Time or the furred squirrel in Orinoco Flow (turn it up).

Many of the works capture the idiosyncratic visual language of the screen, something continually encountered but rarely considered. Images duplicate across space like so many pop-up windows, WiFi symbols and battery levels haunt corners, the memory of the screen manifested in the real world. The crowded visual field of Existing?? captures the anxiety of living through the multifold disaster of climate change, economic decline, and the proliferation of toxic online culture.

The portrait of Britney Spears declaring “my government is killing me” in a traditional meme format provides a sharply layered critique both of our current moment and of the treatment of women in the early 2000s, a time contemporaneous with much of the tapestry’s imagery. Car Dependency Propaganda takes a popular children's rug-turned-meme and cheekily reverts it back into its original form. One wall of the main gallery takes on the dissonance between the digital and natural worlds, overlaid with the spectre of climate change. Fight or Flight distills this juxtaposition, a screaming emoji presiding over a swarm of dying bees. Yet Memesis also includes messages of hope and resistance, including several works memorializing the viral orca uprising. With all the works in this show, Mattes plumbs the connections between the digital and physical, between humor and despair, and the collective modes of communication we develop to make sense of it all.