Sydney Beach Zester: Giddy and Gusto

October 29 - November 22, 2024

The Pit Palm Springs

The Pit is pleased to present Giddy and Gusto, the first solo exhibition by Wilmington-based artist Sydney Beach Zester with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view at the Palm Springs location from October 29 - November 22, 2024. Standing before Sydney Zester’s technicolor quilts, it is nearly impossible not to feel the exuberance—the sheer delight—of their creator. Harnessing the effulgent energy of color, the consonant pleasure of composition, and the embodied resonance of fabric, the eight textile works in Giddy and Gusto enliven and console in equal measure.

At the core of these compositions are traditional matrilineal quilting techniques that Zester has been refining and reimagining since childhood. The artist first learned to sew from her aunt, a master seamstress, who had learned from her mother and so forth, back through the generations. The concentric squares in some say so and teeter totter are variations on Housetop patterns, while the bold vertical stripes in haverhill and somersault are inspired by the Amish Bar. In each case, the geometric designs function as scaffolding that Zester deftly embraces and resists. Where the warp may preserve the past, the weft traverses novel territory, responding and adapting to the demands of the present.

Zester’s emphasis on stitching, seam, thread, and texture centers the quilts' constructions, undermining their apotheosis as flat, painting-like planes. Instead of adding backing—fabric or canvas—to the stretched quilts, she lays bare the ways the disparate fragments form wholes that transcend the sum of their parts. Therein, evidence of the process and production of each textile is preserved in the form as the form itself.

For Zester, fabric sourcing is as significant as construction. The works in this exhibition comprise depression-era feed sacks, Indigo-dyed French bed linen, antique English hemp, and 1900s antique linen from Ireland. Bound together, they connect diverse histories, cultures, and traditions in systems of relationality and mutual belonging. Similar to assemblage art, textile collage alchemizes dissonance without eradicating difference. The resulting material inconsistencies, juxtapositions, improvisations, and unexpected affinities engender a kaleidoscopic effect.

From salmon pink and sage to ultramarine and incarnadine, the quilt's mesmeric color combinations and simultaneous contrasts animate similar instances of relationality and relativity. The vermillion linen, for example, oscillates between ruby red and flame orange depending on the brightness and warmth of the surrounding hues, just as the antique hemp varies from gray to green. Unlike the kinds of color play that suggest optical illusions and magic tricks, here it appears more like a gesture of reciprocity. Where the former is intellectually perceived, the latter is intuitively felt.

The heightened tactility of textiles and the physical intimacy associated with fibers engender an embodied response. The makers' bodies—but also the bodies for whom they were sewn, used, loved, outgrown—are woven and worn into each fabric scrap. Perhaps this is why the luminous abstractions inspire such familiarity. Considering that we don textiles daily, sleep within them, are swaddled in them when we’re born, and buried beneath them in the end, there is perhaps no other material more intimately connected to the human condition—an observation that Zester bears out in each pass and pull of needle and thread. –Tara Anne Dalbow

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@the-pit.la.

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