Sarah Zapata explores pre-Hispanic textile techniques and multigenerational Peruvian feminine crafts through her intricate and labor-intensive fiber work. These manual processes are combined with modern and industrial carpet manufacturing techniques in work that explores themes such as gender, ethnicity, colonialism, and performativity.

Interested in color’s emotional saliency and its ability to convey meanings across time and regions, Zapata chooses her color schemes carefully. For this new immersive and site-specific commission, she reflects on the Bible book of Revelation, working in a combination of neutral colors paired with the striking boldness of purples and reds. Drawing on the apocalyptic nature of this text, Zapata uses this installation to engage her relationship to fear—particularly as stoked by the pandemic and other events of the past year. Ultimately, the work is her vision of an undetermined but optimistic in-between space: a resilience of things not seen, or, hope.

Image: Sarah Zapata, In vastness of borrowed time (the taxing of a fruitful procession), 2020–21; natural and synthetic fiber. Photo courtesy of Crisis Galeria.