Cassandra Mayela

_e_ _z_ _ _a, a star

NADA HOUSE 2022

June 4 - August 7, 2022

Olympia is pleased to present _e_ _z_ _ _a, a star, an exhibition of new textile works by Cassandra Mayela made during her NADA 2022 Artist Residency. The residency revolves around Mayela’s ongoing meditation on the complex nature of migration.

For Mayela, a star is a symbol of reclamation. By cutting and reconstructing a Venezuelan sports jacket, Mayela returns home. 4 collages of organza over cotton fabric – separation, parting, severance, and rupture – document what has become a ritual in her practice of rupturing  the relic, for it to be relieved of its past-life and given a new purpose of contemplation. Mayela works to open a repository of personal and social experiences of diaspora, blurring the lines between artifact and contemporary sculptural and textile practices.

In tandem with the creation of new works, Cassandra Mayela utilized this residency to continue an ongoing project, Maps of Displacement – a participatory series of site-specific installations created through repurposing Venezuelan immigrants' clothes to create tapestries that evoke one of the largest modern-day refugee crises. Maps of Desplazamiento: FL I, specifically focuses on Venezuelans who, by one means or another, have settled  in the state of Florida. By re-contextualizing individuals' articles of clothing into map-like sculptures, Mayela calls into question the sensationalism tied to movements of displacement, as well as our own relationship to the garments that hide or reveal our most vulnerable selves.

Cassandra Mayela (b. Caracas 1989) is a self-taught textile artist who has lived in NY since 2014 when she forcedly migrated from Venezuela. Her personal experiences as an immigrant and a woman of color have shaped the urgencies in her work. She is curious about clothing’s story-telling capacities and is particularly interested in how migration affects one’s identity and ideas of belonging. Through research, conversations, audience participation, and engaging with textiles and collected and found material, she creates community-oriented work that informs how fundamental changes in fabric can affect one’s perception of identity, highlighting new waves of empowerment. 

Her work has been exhibited at Vacation Gallery (2019), La Salita (2020), Acompi/ NARS Foundation (2021), Olympia Gallery (2021) and JO-HS (2022).  NADA House is Mayela’s first residency, and she has forthcoming fellowships with Amant (May 2022) and at Succurro (October 2022).

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