SASHA CHAVCHAVADZE
Artist Statement
My mixed media paintings, multimedia installations, and public projects excavate and reactivate forgotten history as a catalyst for change, with a focus on the lives of erased or marginalized, self-identifying women. My research-based practice is a form of autoethnography; as I sift through fragments of other people’s lives, images and words reach out to me across time with a sense of urgency, speaking intensely to contemporary issues, and enabling me to express themes of disappearance, loss and survival in my own life.
Antique fabric is a central medium and metaphor in my work. As I cut, paint, collage, repurpose and photograph antique lace and linen – repositories of memory - I am disrupting social hierarchies and toxic systems of gender and class embedded in the materials. This moment of destruction creates a tension behind my work; delicate surfaces interact with fragmentary images of broken plates, teacups, and shards. As I collage watercolor and ink images to mixed media surfaces, I am creating visual ecosystems that express the pathos and power of erased voices and are elegies to lost mentors.
My six-year, multimedia project “Disrupting the Fabric” focuses on the life and words of the American writer Margaret Fuller (1810-1850). The project includes installations of mixed media paintings, assemblages, archival digital prints and video animations. Fuller, who died young in a shipwreck, wrote the first American book on women’s rights, advocated for incarcerated women and against the cancer of slavery. I apply images and words from Fuller’s life to the warp and weft of mypaintings. Fuller’s creative tools are also my tools - her pencil, pen, scissors and glasses are ubiquitous throughout my paintings.
I have created multiple, collaborative, interdisciplinary art platforms focused on forgotten history, that are an extension of my art practice. These research-based projects have enriched my work, while building connection and community with others. I founded the interdisciplinary exhibition/event space Proteus Gowanus, a cultural hub in Brooklyn for ten years. Today, I co-lead two collaborative art platforms: the SALLY project, named after Sally Hemings, uses art to reactivate the lives of forgotten or marginalized women through exhibitions and public conversations across the U.S; the Footnote project uses art to explore forgotten history and its effect on memory and place through installations and publications.