This exhibition presents fiber-based installations by San Francisco-based artist Holly Wong, whose work aims to reclaim the female body and reveal beauty in brokenness. Wong’s work is embedded with past traumas and mourning; it memorializes her mother, who was a victim of domestic and sexual violence, as well as the artist’s own experience with mental illness related to self-harm and body-related trauma. As a whole, the work’s weightlessness and ephemeral quality represents her emergence from this pain with acceptance and celebration. As the artist has described it, the central installation’s boundless presence is a powerful reclamation of feminine strength:
“With Guardian of the Spirits, I have created my alter ego; the same one that all women contain. The bigger, stronger, more-powerful self that we can’t see, but it’s there. It’s loving, and protecting. And it takes up space. It claims space. It says, ‘I am here.’ It is expansive. It has no limitations.”