IG: @alyssaevangelistastudio

re/semblance

My understanding of love began in the home. Here, care was materialized through acts of sacred labor. Meals were cooked amongst chaos, and gifts were given in the form of beds made. This foundation formed my understanding of family, creativity, and my identity. Over time, however, this care began to appear in tandem with isolation and sacrifice, born from the shape of lingering patriarchy within my home and family. Identities became reduced to responsibilities; labor sustained a household, but also limited the space and time available for one’s own ambitions.

This inherited expectation of self-sacrifice generated surreal and symbolic imagery wherein objects become bodily, and bodies become object-like. Self-portraits are transformed by cyanotype, allowing for them to become altered from reality. Faces, now blue and hazy become reflective of the loss of self I feel within the domestic. In contrast to the rigidity of home-making, I intuitively collage with domestic textiles, allowing edges to fray and remain ‘unfinished.’ It is in this series that I hold the tensions between tenderness and unease. What once lived only internally becomes something intimate and shared. Textiles become vessels for questioning these acts of care while also acknowledging my own gratitude for the sacrifices that live in my maternal histories.

Bio

Alyssa Evangelista is a textile artist and fashion designer whose work is guided both by craft lineage and personal narrative. Her work investigates the quiet negotiations of identity through an understanding of the body as both subject and material. Her processes include fabric collage, cyanotype, screen printing, and painting with dye. She often blends intuitive material play with meditative handwork. Through layered compositions, gestural machine stitching, and the use of the figure, she reflects on states of “in-betweenness.” Her work exists between revealing and concealing, presence and absence, comfort and constraint, holding these tensions in her work.