Exhibition - Sara Hubbs and Sarah Zapata

MOCA Tucson presents an exhibition featuring glass and textile based works by artists Sara Hubbs and Sarah Zapata that are informed by personal and familial histories. Combining traditional techniques and experimental processes with their chosen materials, the artists create otherworldly objects and environments.

Taking an intuitive and unconventional approach to glass-blowing, Sara Hubbs often makes vessels—containers that map the contours of absence—to consider the act of holding space within caretaking and grief. Her sculptures are formed using objects from her life that reflect her roles as parent and kin such as breast pumps, medical tubing, toy packaging, and organic matter. Attending to the ways we shape one another, she uses multi-step casting, slumping, and firing methods that alter her material references, resulting in varied states of legibility, distortion, and abstraction. Fluctuating between familiar and ambiguous, her sculptures resemble brightly hued internal organs, mysterious organic matter, otherworldly creatures, or translucent topographies.

Sarah Zapata uses traditional weaving techniques like coiling and latch-hooking with vibrant colorways to create lush textile objects. Drawing from her identity as a Peruvian-American growing up queer in the Evangelical church, her work is informed by ancient textile traditions, Christian symbolism, colonial histories, and queer theory. Her exuberant fiber works are collaged amalgamations of styles and techniques, embedded with historically-rich signifiers like stripes and camouflage, and incorporate protruding forms that resemble slumping horns or bodily growths. Working in large-scale sculptural and architectural dimensions to produce immersive spaces of fantasy, Zapata notes, “I want to create these otherworldly experiences for the viewer to access ideas of potential and futurity.”

Together, the glassy surfaces of Hubbs’s objects and the soft grain of Zapata’s textiles implicate the body and gesture towards embodied processes of production. Their artworks converge in a constellation of strange objects, vibrant hues, and an abundance of textures, to evoke a sense of possibility.