Uma Rani Iyli: Connective Threads
Press Release
Uma Rani Iyli
Connective Threads
Exhibition Dates: March 15 – April 19, 2025
Reception: Saturday, March 15th from 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present Connective Threads, the spun thread ‘paintings’ of Uma Rani Iyli. Having grown up in India’s traditional caste-based society, Iyli identifies as belonging to the female Indian weaver’s community. She references weaving, stitching and pattern making in her art using remnant thread sourced directly from weaver communities collected during her annual trips to Southern India. Through her use of silk threads and plexiglas tubes, she spins vibrant colors inspired by traditional Saris.
“Embracing the practices of my ancestors is always at the forefront of my work in my journey to connect my past and present. Having grown up in India’s traditional caste-
based society, I identify myself belonging to the weaver’s community. With that identity and sense of pride, I reference weaving, stitching and pattern making in my work.
“Annual trips to India and our time-based meditative processes such as wrapping and repetitive mark making inform my art practice revealing the connective threads that tie
them all together. My meditative process employs practices tied to my female identity of my Indian background and childhood memories. Each line that crosses another echoes the tradition of weaving and storytelling from my heritage”.
Pilar Agüero Esparza
Press Release
Pilar Agüero-Esparza
Darker than the deepest sea… weaker than the palest blue
Exhibition Dates: March 15 – April 19, 2025
Reception: Saturday, March 15th from 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Events: TBA
PSG is excited to present Pilar Agüero-Esparza in her first one-person exhibition with the gallery. Our first presentation of Agüero Esparza’s work was in The Calligraphy of Absence in the spring of 2024. Pilar is recognized for her installations, paintings, and objects reflecting the palette and politics of skin tone, specifically Brown and Black skin. Her paintings are a hybrid of formal, hard-edged geometric abstraction, accentuated by her coded color palette, intersecting with her family’s tradition of huarache-making (woven leather Mexican sandals). The paintings assume the direct, flat linear approach of geometric abstraction, but with a palette describing hierarchies of color, mitigated by woven leather. She extolls the craft and indigeneity of her family’s Mexican history, electrifying disparate and formidable concepts. In lesser hands, the collision of material, tradition, practice, heritage, and aesthetics might implode, but instead the elegant grace of the woven and the symmetry of the hardedged present a striking attunement—a singular approach to how Agüero-Esparza navigates the politics of color.
Pilar Agüero-Esparza received a BA in Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA in Spatial Art from San Jose State University. In 2025, she will receive the prestigious Eureka Fellowship Award from the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. Agüero-Esparza has exhibited her work in institutions including the San Jose Museum of Art, Triton Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, the De Young Museum, and the Montalvo Arts Center. In 2017, her work was featured in the exhibition “The U.S.-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility” at the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles, as part of the Getty Foundation Southern California initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art. In 2019, the U.S.-Mexico Border exhibition traveled to Lille, France, as part of the Eldorado Lille 3000 arts festival. In 2022, as an artist-in-residence and Lucas Artist Fellow, she was commissioned to create a large-scale outdoor work for the exhibition “Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in Landscape” at the Montalvo Arts Center.