Mixografia is pleased to present Dry Clean Only, a solo exhibition celebrating the release of Analia Saban’s new suite of eight Mixografia prints. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, September 28 from 4 - 6pm, at Mixografia, (1419 East Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. 90011). The event is free and open to the public, with complimentary valet parking and refreshments.
Analia Saban’s latest collaboration with Mixografia depicts a series of garment labels reconstituted as handmade paper prints, dramatically scaled up from their original size. Each print in the suite looks beyond the familiar function of clothing tags as non-aesthetic utilitarian objects. Saban reveals the often-dismissed nuances that result from a definitively mechanical process, embodied in the textural embroidery and varying coarseness of these otherwise unassuming fabric fragments.
Their heightened scale accentuates their subtleties and imperfections, contrasting the precision and uniformity associated with the methods of their mass production. A human touch is evident in the ways in which they are worn down, frayed at the edges, and hastily severed from the hems of the clothing items to which they were once attached.
Beyond their textural characteristics, the descriptive content within the labels calls attention to the larger context of textile manufacturing and the global trade of goods. Textual elements emphasize a transcontinental production and distribution chain; graphic symbols and succinct language fragments communicate a diversity of information in their very limited available space, presented in consideration of a global mass market that will receive them. Whether it is to designate the instructions of their proper care, to identify their material composition, or to denote the national origin of their manufacture, mark-making is a central component of these objects that are at once distinguished and obscured by their prevalence in the world.
Analia Saban (b. 1980, Buenos Aires) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a BFA in Visual Arts from Loyola University, New Orleans in 2001, followed by an MFA in New Genres at the University of California Los Angeles in 2005. Saban has works included in museum collections worldwide, such as: The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Marciano Art Foundation; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, New York; Norton Museum of Art in Florida; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas; Centre Pompidou in Paris; and Israel Museum in Jerusalem, among others.