Amanda Chwelos | Soft enough to slip through

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Amanda Chwelos, “You watch until you can't watch any longer,” 2024

oil and pencil crayon on canvas (courtesy of the Artist)

Opening Reception: July 6, 7-9pm

Ornamentation is an invitation and a barrier. Amanda Chwelos takes a closer look at the contradictions, anxieties, and banalities of the decorative. Soft enough to slip through features a new series of drawings and oil paintings that combine motifs of domestic wrought iron air vents, fences, and grates, together with intimate observations from daily life. These barriers typically demarcate space for purposes of safety, property, and exclusion. To Chwelos, the ornamented designs are also metaphorical boundaries. They characterize the kind of soft architectures of clothing and personal decoration that protect and separate human subjectivities.

On the wall of the gallery is a diptych of two small oil paintings in extreme close-up, one of the insertion of a contact lens, and the other of a mosquito. Both works bare the faint traces of decorative wrought-iron architecture fading in and through their respective figures. The mosquito is poised to break the barrier of skin and the contact lens is about to become an invisible membrane of the body.

Like personal fences of skin and clothing, these wrought iron architectures are also surfaces of inhabitation and admission (1). Both fences and frocks dissolve into their containing structures, becoming unnoticed conditions of access.

Lisa Robertson, “Doubt and the History of Scaffolding,” in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2011), 142.