The Making in the Unraveling: Tia Keobounpheng on the visceral, the familial, and the somatic 

Banner image: THREADS no16 (detail), 2024. Thread on panel, 24 x 18". Image courtesy of the artist's website.

 

How do we reconcile what we don’t know? How do we unearth familial history without undoing ourselves completely? As Tia Keobounpheng asks, “What would it look and feel like to exist knowing the things that have been buried?” Not to perpetuate narratives, but to expand from what is learned? Why do we wait until it’s too late to ask questions? 

These are the questions that animate Keobounpheng’s exhibition Gas’kal (In the Space Between). In the uncharted territory of reconciling ancestral truth, Keobounpheng weaves and unweaves tapestries. Maps. Portraits. Call them what you may, each piece is a unique combination of colored pencil drawn on wood and thread interlacing drilled holes. With work that perplexes the human eye, and emanates an “auric,” from-the-body quality, Keobounpheng familiarizes herself with lost relatives and seeks understanding in the space between grief, examination, and reimagination.

With past exhibitions following Keobounpheng’s maternal line into Sápmi and northern Sweden, Norway, and Finland, this body of work sits closer generationally, attentive to her paternal immediate family. Keobounpheng cared for her aunt in the process of dying. The overall family relationship to her aunt was strained, leading Keobounpheng to visit her while in hospice, help process her belongings after she passed, and plan her funeral. Every piece in the show was at some stage of completion within that time frame. This burdensome reality set the conditions for creating, and it shaped Keobounpheng’s exhibition at Weinstein Hammons’ Three Rooms, a concurrent grouping of three solo exhibitions on view through February 8. For Keobounpheng, coming home to the work amidst nursing home visits and funeral arrangements made the tapestries a place to drop in. “Coming from design, I have access to tools — I could be mapping all of this out on a computer and have a machine cut all of the holes precisely — but instead I do it all with my body," she says. "I believe women have been working with their hands and with their bodies to process their lot in life for millennia." 

 

Gas'kal (In the Space Between) (detail), installation view. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

She engages with both the visceral and somatic aspects of her work, completing the stress cycle in a way. Employing muscle, skin, and bones to drill, color, and thread repetitively, Keobounpheng is somatically, physically in the work. But from an emotional sense the work is wholly visceral, given the heart-, brain-, and gut-centered processing taking place. “It taps into the multiple ways of knowing — epigenetically or through blood memory or whatever you want to call it — what I’m trying to support in my practice is allowing myself to acknowledge what my body knows.” Together the elements of Keobounpheng’s work support a reconciliation with this place of knowable and unknowable family truths. Speaking about the family matters behind the work is delicate, given the tensions and falling-outs of the past. “I think what I’m doing in my work, in general, is I am processing unresolved issues in my lineage.” The physical process of making the work aided her emotional metabolism, and given the intensity of relating to the work in that way, the clarity of the exhibition’s meaning came to her only with some distance. 

Keobounpheng began utilizing geometry as a visual language after being exposed to her son’s 4th grade distance learning curriculum during the pandemic. “Geometry felt like a perfect order,” she says, and thinking about geometry as a reflection of the earth was eye-opening. “For me it felt like I had been existing in that linear plane, and geometry helps me drop down into the circular plane, which is a very different way of existing. You can liken it to more indigenous ways of thinking versus colonial ways of thinking.” Embracing the “expansive,” “transformative,” and “inclusive” expressions of geometry, Keobounpheng is able to explore interwoven relationships, connectivity, and diversity in her practice.

 

THREADS no17, 2024. Thread on panel, 20 x 16". Image courtesy of the artist's website.

 

There are three series present in Gas’kal, with each piece falling under the groupings of STUDY, THREADS, or WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE. The STUDY trilogy explores the relationship between colored pencil and thread on wood, and the transparency that gets caught in the middle. Sometimes blurring her own categorical lines, Keobounpheng brings threads to pieces that originally didn't have any. Each THREADS piece tends to “explore and practice holding multiple patterns together” with overlapping circles and channels, growing in complexity from piece to piece. THREADS no17, THREADS no20, and THREADS no16 show that progression.

Meanwhile WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE (WDYTYA) is a series of abstract portraits. Embodying an individual or a relationship between multiple individuals, each piece is enveloped by black and white capsule-shaped forms. The largest piece in the show, WDYTYA no13, represents Keobounpheng’s aunt, and the experience of being alongside her and helping her pass. At the top of this piece, there is a “release valve” as she puts it, a space without threading or color but pencil marks indicating there was meant to be. Allowing that space to breathe, to switch course, can allow for a shift in her perspective of the ancestor being studied. Something Keobounpheng did differently with this show, specifically with the WDYTYA pieces, is expanding the threads beyond the capsule form, reaching them across the wood. The negative space created at the edges of each panel provides a contrast to the concentrated color within the capsule. “And it becomes almost like lace, or some sort of draping over,” she says. “I finished the colored pencil layer just a few hours before she passed… So the process of threading was literally like laying things to rest in a physical way.” In WDYTYA no14 there is a similar laciness, and Keobounpheng says this piece reflects her grandma, who died when she was one.

 

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE no13, 2024. Colored pencil and thread on panel, 96 x 48". Image courtesy of the artist's website.

 

The Sámi word gas’kal speaks to what exists between the threads. It speaks to Keobounpheng’s “between, in, and among” relationship to her work, and the cellular memory that stretches, bridging her to her aunt. The artist explains how she sees “the warp as threads of time and lineage, and the weft as our learned behaviors that are held in place by the warp.” With the criss-crossed nature of warp and weft, one cannot be loosened without the other. Careful not to displace her own self while weaving through time and lineage, she made an adjustment. “When I started using geometry, I began to remove myself by removing this weft in a way. Thinking of the tapestries as foundations of warp that are telling me stories about who and where I come from, and it's then in between these threads where the emotion, nuance, and maybe even the visceral knowing exists.” 

One of the pieces in the show, WDYTYA no12, contains a dark blue cloud that hovers above the capsule form. Keobounpheng came to see this tapestry as her own portrait, and the weighty ray of responsibility she carried through her aunt’s death, as well as the holding of both collective and individual grief. Recalling a hospice visit near the end of her aunt’s life, she said, “It was very clear that her brain was swirling around time and mixing things together, and at the same time would say things that were strange but powerfully poetic…she was clearly in an in-between space.” 

There’s a natural, tragic abstraction there, like pulling on a thread and unmaking a garment. Keobounpheng’s exhibition reveals what remains when grief unravels: the concurrent feelings of ending and endlessness; the often uncomfortable, lengthened range of perception and memory; and the changed terrain of lived, corporeal experience, all bound by that unnamed immensity. ◼︎ 

 

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE no12, 2024. Colored pencil and thread on panel, 24 x 18". Image courtesy of the artist's website.

 

Three Rooms, which includes Gas'kal (In the Space Between), is on view at Weinstein Hammons Gallery through February 8. This is the first of three articles about the exhibitions on display. Follow the gallery on Instagram @weinsteinhammons.

To see more of Tia Keobounpheng's work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @tiakeo.art.