Artwork Description
Branch
Dimensions: 60 x 60″
Year: 2016
Media: mixed media on panel
In her mixed media work, Branch, Tichava presents a complex visual playground replete with geometric patterning, bright and muted colors, and carefully layered pigments. The work plays on the tension between the natural and the man made, suggesting through process that the distinction between the two spheres has gradually shifted and faded over time—particularly with respect to visual culture.
Nina Tichava draws from her familial and personal ties to New Mexico to inform a body of work that can be described as both organic and geometric. Building upon her parents’ artistic practices, including photography and weaving, Tichava uses visual language to reference Native American culture and overcome the barriers imposed by her non-native heritage. While her mixed media works often use repetitive patterning, Tichava describes her work as abstract and informed by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and Frank Stella. Her work relies on processes of layering, building intricate patterning and layers of pigment to generate finished products that are at once auto-biographical and visually complex; by superimposing colors and shapes, Tichava suggests that the various layers reference layers of personal experience. Tichava uses materials such as paper, paint, and beads to render three-dimensional weaving onto otherwise two-dimensional canvases, allowing her to work as weaver, painter, and sculptor and produce works that cannot be defined by a single genre.
by Keira Seidenberg, Art History/Gender Studies student, McGill University