Stretch, Hold, Release
September 18 - October 25, 2025
Opening Reception: September 18, 2025 6:00 - 8:00pm


Picture Theory is pleased to announce Stretch, Hold, Release, a group show highlighting the interchange of cultural memory and fiber-based materiality. As the title suggests—these emerging contemporary artists root their creative practices within the field of fiber arts, situating these continuous hand-making processes within the greater poetic capacity for textiles to transmute ways of knowing–not from static categorization, empiric knowledge, or documented traditions–but as dynamic flows cresting precisely across unified mental and bodily systems.  

Exploring craft heritage from Indigenous Guatemalan weaving traditions and South East Asian ikat dyed weaving techniques, Luis Emilio Romero and Terumi Saito expand the rigorous iconography of each’s inherited material wisdom reflecting the artist’s hybrid perspectives within our globalized world. Undeniably distinct cultural markers of localized wisdom traditions, Romero and Saito each overlay these techniques with an additional unexpected process in their work allowing confrontations of each piece’s objecthood to evade stringent categorization, therefore offering instead aesthetic harmonies that triumph over pedantic museology.

On the other side of the pendulum’s swing, utilizing more industrial scale knitting and heat pressed velvet yardage Elissa Lutteral and Lior Modan respectively make plain otherwise unnoticed structures. Both metaphorically and physically Lutteral’s and Modan’s surfaces extend beyond their material parts to transgress their purported genres of objecthood. Pushing beyond the utility of design, Lutteral’s elongated gloves generate ever changing visual structures of human interconnection through performance art.

Elements of the familiar quickly expand into the realm of the absurd: materializing the unrelenting push and pull of desire, duty, attachment, or guilt. Taking concrete form, Lutteral conveys the physicality of these mental constructs that all-too-often have energetic consequences subsumed within governing systems of the body. Whereas–in contrast to instantiating the unseen–Modan denies the garment-centric use function of velvet fabric, instead harnessing its subtle refractive qualities of lightbearing to generate ghostly frozen forms that firmly connote bas relief sculptures. Isolating familiar objects from their own immediacy, Modan instead offers an uncanny trace of what things might have been–relying on experiential memory to complete each form’s own instantiation.

JaLeel Porcha utilizes the laborious pictorial tapestry tradition to interrogate the knowledge systems surrounding nostalgia, unprimed personal experience, and utopian constructions of nature. Together these coalesce as significant sources for the communal strength of sensory memory, as decentralized sites of personal growth, that collectively elevate alternatives to empirical knowledge systems.

Defying the limitations of strict adherence to extant textile traditions, this group of contemporary artists provide complex counter-processes for familiar materials, creating objects that capture our current era’s unconventional paradigm shifts. Where protected technical expertise gives way to disquieting juxtapositions, which reveal the societal disjunctures of our present moment.


–Carson Woś