POSTPONED Siempre Más / Always More
**Events may have been canceled or postponed. Please contact the venue to confirm the event.
Date & Time
Sat, Jul 25 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Address (map)
229 E Victoria St., Santa Barbara
This Event Has Been Postponed
Due to Santa Barbara County’s COVID-19 regulations pertaining to museums, galleries and zoos, the anticipated opening on July 25th of Siempre Más / Always More, an exhibition of textile works by Minga Opazo at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara, is postponed.
The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to announce Siempre Más / Always More, an exhibition of textile works by Minga Opazo. Visitors are invited to view the exhibition on Saturdays, 1:00 to 4:00 pm, July 25 through September 12. The artist will be present on July 25 & August 22. (Self-screening, masks, and social distancing are required.) A live, online Conversation with Minga Opazo and Yessica Torres of Dab Art Gallery (LA) will take place on Wednesday, September 9 at 5:00 pm.
In Siempre Más / Always More, Opazo explores the relationship of textiles to climate change, contemporary industrial textile production, and Chilean textile history. A fourth-generation craftsperson from Chile, Opazo exposes the unsustainable and dehumanizing practices of international textile production through large-scale weavings and installations made of found and recycled textiles.
For centuries, textiles for clothing in Chile were created by human hands using natural materials. These craft traditions shaped Chilean culture, providing communities with work, artistic expression, and a sense of identity. With the invention of polyester, Lycra, and nylon, and the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet (from 1973 to 1990), Chile’s doors opened to the free market and mass-produced garments flooded in. Natural dyes and hand looms were replaced by artificial dyes, machines, and dehumanizing assembly lines. Opazo’s series, Mejor Que Sobre Que Falte (Better Too Much Than Too Little), refers to the glut of discarded, chemically infused garments, which cannot be absorbed back into the natural world and are now being buried under Chilean soil.
Siempre Más / Always More includes wall sculptures, installations, and a new, site-specific weaving outdoors on the 2nd story porch railing of the Architectural Foundation, facing Victoria Street. This temporary installation highlights the fact that while the colors of used clothing will fade, the clothing will never completely disintegrate. Opazo comments, “We live in an era of excess, we consume and throw away. We don’t see the massive amount of overproduction in our everyday life, it’s invisible to us, tucked away.”