akeylah wellingtonloves the smell of Pink. She thinks you probably do, too. Her tapestries and sculptures deal with humor as both a noun connoting comedy and a verb meaning to endure. Working with found media from the 2000s, her attention to technological and political developments is an attempt to make sense of her personal experience of carceral-related displacement, loss, girlhood, generational inheritances, and time.
small things to consider: unrequited platonic love letters, soft power
Pecha Projects is pleased to present soft power, akeylah wellington’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. In new, large-scale bead tapestries and curtains, wellington explores a confluence of Black cosmologies, craft, and satellite space observation. The exhibition references the international studies term referring to a nation’s nonviolent influence through scientific advancement, economic contributions, or cultural exchange. wellington deploys custom designed, handmade upright tapestry looms and adapted tools to represent a glittery, celestial field made of quasars, supernovae, and lens aberrations.
In soft power, wellington creates tapestries made out of pony-beads, a traditional accessory to braided hairstyles, from pixelated images of the Hubble Space Telescope (circa 1990—2009). wellington applies her glitchy, crafty, Web-inspired visual language to engage the history of astronomical drawings, memetic photos of space, and pictures made as evidence of surveillance rather than as expressions of appreciation. The series is a departure from her earlier text-based tapestries, but utilizes her characteristic palette: transparent hues, chromatic neutrals, and faceted beads in unexpected places. She treats each bead as a discrete unit of light and color and a pixel of her generation’s memory of aerospace technology.
for inquiries, please email the gyal at awellingtonart[@]gmail.com