10/02/2025
TONIGHT! CAT’S CRADLE - 157 Gallery - Oct 1st / Oct 14th - 511 NW Broadway
Charli Beck, Kobey Bonin, Limei Lai, Ella Martini, Isabella Saavedra, and Hayashi Wilder
Curated by Lauren Hough
A string figure can do infinite things; form shapes, connect people and places, tell stories, play games, tangle and untangle… Inspired by Donna Haraway’s notion of the ‘string figure’ as a method of assembly that “propose[s] and enact[s] patterns for participants to inhabit…on a vulnerable and wounded earth”, the string figure, such as a Cat’s Cradle, becomes the ideal instruction for creating art in an immensely connected world.
CAT’S CRADLE invites us to question the boundaries of the “self” and the “human”, and to recognize the complex, knotted relations we are inextricably woven in. The emergent structures in the gallery suggest a desire for new entangements with the world around us in ways that might restructure our sensual impulses, sense of time and scale, and ethical imperatives.
Here, viewers are introduced to a variety of stringy mediums including fiber optic cables, strands of hair, mesh, taught ropes, and hand-spun yarn. Each of the six artists’ pieces speaks to an ecological sense of the string figure, but also each artist’s practice of world-building found in the act of figuration.
