Panda Landa "Altar Iv" Hand-Dyed Fabric, Spiral Textile Wall Art in Chartreuse and Lemon, 2024

Details

Description

Rectangles of acid chartreuse, lemon and mustard spiral inward toward a small gold center, separated by quiet bands of cream … Read more Rectangles of acid chartreuse, lemon and mustard spiral inward toward a small gold center, separated by quiet bands of cream and a cloudy gray-green that looks washed in with water. The cloths read as separate pieces of one sunlit field, their edges not quite parallel and their corners meeting with a hand-sewn looseness. Landa's ALTAR pieces stack layered bands around a center, and here the stack feels like a desert flower seen from above, bright at its edges and pale where the dye has pooled. Every fabric is second-hand and dyed by hand, which explains the watery aqua haze drifting through the lime and the soft variation inside each yellow.

A burst of citrus that wakes up a neutral room. Hang it above a pale sofa, in a home office or beside a window where natural light can lift the chartreuse. It plays well with gray, charcoal, white oak and navy, and picks up yellow in books, ceramics or a patterned throw. The upright format fits a narrow wall or the space between two windows.

Hand-dyed fabric on stretcher bars, 16 x 20 x 0.75 in (40.6 x 50.8 x 1.9 cm). Unframed.

Panda Landa builds each piece from second-hand fabric that is dyed by hand, then cut and sewn together by instinct and improvisation, letting the composition develop naturally. Seams join the cloths into bands, arches, triangles and spirals, and the dye is left to pool and bloom, so the mottling in each cloth stays part of the surface. The sewn panel is stretched over wooden stretcher bars about three quarters of an inch deep and is unframed.

Panda Landa (b. 1982) is a queer, non-binary visual artist and filmmaker raised in the Nevada desert and now based in Joshua Tree, California. Self-taught, they work through instinct and improvisation, making mixed-media textile pieces from second-hand fabrics that are dyed by hand, stitched and stretched over frames. Sustainability is central to the practice, and every cloth arrives with its own history.

Their ongoing series, including PORTAL, ALTAR, ECLIPSE, VESSEL and RITUAL, touch on queerness, identity, ancestral narrative, healing and transformation, and more recent beaded panels carry short, tender phrases in color. Landa made the 2022 film In the Middle of Everywhere and has offered a workshop on giving new life to clothes at the Joshua Tree Music Festival. See less