On the Move: Who Will Let Us In? by Mirka Knaster
Opening Saturday September 6th
Runs through Saturday September 27th, 2025
The show can be viewed during our regular hours, Fridays & Saturdays 1-4pm
May 29 2025 - May 29 2025
September in the Gallery – On the Move: Who Will Let Us In?
On the Move: Who Will Let Us In? addresses an urgent issue that has been with us for millennia. As a naturalized citizen of the U.S., I know what immigration means and what causes anyone to leave the familiar and move toward the unknown: wars, civil riots, famine, environmental degradation, religious persecution, human rights violations, economic hardship, political instability, and now extreme weather events and rising sea levels. Though America has always been made up of immigrants (even the ancestors of Native Americans migrated here from another part of the world), today’s immigrants have sparked yet another nativist backlash. Too often, they experience rejection rather than empathy.
As I stitched the organically formed shapes in rust-dyed repurposed cloth, Korean handmade paper (hanji), and used tea bags, I noticed how imaginary scenes and maps emerged. They reflect the journeys immigrants undertake for a better life for themselves and their families. While the stitched shapes do not depict specific landscapes, seascapes, or cityscapes, they are reminiscent and evocative of places immigrants traverse in order to reach safety. They travel up and down rivers, across mountains and oceans, through canyons, swamps, deserts, and forests. Sometimes they sleep under starry skies; at other times, they are tossed about in the midst of storms. Taking huge risks and encountering danger, they can’t help but wonder whether someone will let them in or turn them away.
Bio:
Since my earliest years, I’ve stood in many worlds, not indigenous anywhere yet, chameleon-like, adapting everywhere. My life began along the Adriatic Sea, with childhood summers later spent at the Atlantic Ocean. I was educated on the east and west coasts of the U.S. I’ve lived in the Andes, Blue Ridge Mountains, and Hawaiian Islands, and traversed much of Latin America, Europe, Asia, southern Africa, New Zealand, and beyond. I now reside on the Mendonoma coast, where the Pacific Ocean has a major impact on my daily sensory experience.
Natural environments, East Asian aesthetics, the places I’ve lived and traveled, 20th-century abstract art, and my meditation practice are the most important influences and inspirations for my art.
After decades of putting black words on white paper as a writer, I find working with different kinds of fiber an exhilarating engagement with color, texture, line, shape and space, pattern and design. I’m fascinated by how textiles (and even paper) have been central to human life since earliest times. They play a universal role in celebrating beauty and imparting feelings, in telling stories about the cultures that create them and marking stages of the life cycle as well as expressing the relationship people have to their environment.
I approach the creative process as an open-ended improvisation. Pieces emerge intuitively, even serendipitously. Because I generally don’t sketch ahead of time, I gradually feel my way into each piece, choosing this color or that textile, dyeing cloth with indigo or rust, incorporating paper, metal or wood, cutting a shape or adding another layer for transparency, working up texture, selecting a thread, stitching another mark or brushing on paint or ink, and including bamboo from my garden. Along the way, I embrace and celebrate the surprises.