Matrilineal: Vita Kari and LaNia Roberts considers interior subjectivity, the performance of identity, and domestic space through work that is deeply influenced by their female elders. Matrilineal is curated by Jennie Lamensdorf for Couchpotato. 

Vita Kari draws inspiration for their textiles from their grandmother’s copious tapestry and rug collection and LaNia Roberts paints her family in her great-grandmother’s kitchen in the West End of Louisville. Their shared vibrant color palette and richly layered work mines their family histories and centers their communities in vibrant paintings, tapestries, sculptures, and videos. The artists engage with complex intersectional identities and present them with joy and rigor. Significantly, both artists employ internet virality as a framing system, a means to expand the work’s accessibility, and to directly engage with their audiences beyond the traditional scope of the contemporary art world. 

Vita explores identity, kinship, and personal subjectivity through textiles, sculptures, and experimental online performance. Their digital Jacquard tapestries merge contemporary online culture, early-aughts nostalgia, Queer history, and intricate rug designs - both traditional and stock image-based designs used by mass-market retainers. Vita withholds some legibility of the resulting works by unweaving parts of the weft (the interwoven horizontal threads) obscuring key parts of the image. This “glitch” in the textile alludes to gaps in information Vita (who is Hard of Hearing/ deaf) experiences when their hearing aids pick up static, rendering sound metallic and difficult to distinguish. Vita’s recent bedazzled trash series, Trash Alter, is both an online prank they post in funny Instagram Reels with the heading, “bedazzling my girlfriend’s trash until she notices,” and a labor-intensive process of raising everyday garbage including La Croix can and Cheetos bags to be put on a literal pedestal. Like a Fabergé egg of the internet era, the intricate detail of the bejeweled trash tells the story of what we treasure and what we discard. 

LaNia’s portraits consider family, Black identity, and the South as sites of contradictory experience and intricate nuance. Her practice draws deep from art history, particularly Fauvist color and Cubist forms, to render the multiplicity of her subjects simultaneously. Her layered paintings celebrate Black identity and challenge one-dimensional presentations of Black Southern culture. Each image replicates body parts (eyes, noses, arms, and legs) as if the figure is in a blur of motion. The bright, highly saturated color adds to the otherworldly effect of the paintings, depicting the figures doing everyday tasks in a vivid kaleidoscope of movement. To develop these works, LaNia first photographs her subjects repeatedly, from many angles, and the resulting collaged paintings combine acrylic on canvas with watercolor paper. The addition of watercolor paper adds a multidimensional aspect to the work that echoes the multifaceted perspective of the figures. In these works, LaNia positions her great-grandmother’s kitchen as the setting for life's moments, big and small, to be centered and celebrated as the fabric of a family. 

Acknowledgements

It takes a village. The Couchpotato crew (aka, Amethyst & Corey) would like to thank Jennie Lamensdorf for curating this fabulous show! We would also like to thank Brooke Crum for lending us a TV, to Ryan Daly for taking my cold call questions about electronics, and to James Coker for his professional digital editing skills. Katy Delahanty and the Portland Museum for continuing our loan of the pedestal (its pink now!). Eli Meiners, Amber Glisson and Casey Beagle, thank you for helping keep our permanent collection on view. Thank you to Mike Kicklighter for letting us borrow his power washer, and to Schaeffer and Francesca Baylor for helping us out in the run-up to the opening. And thank you to Aaron Kicklighter for your gametime staple gun loan.

Jennie Lamensdorf founded Arts & Culture Partners to build culture strategy and arts partnerships for clients who believe in the urgent necessity of artists and arts organizations. Her background as a contemporary art curator and experience building and leading corporate art programs informs her cultural strategy work and drives her commitment to supporting artists and cultural organizations. Jennie believes art has the power to encourage thoughtfulness, empathy, and creative problem solving and she brings this critical work to new platforms and audiences. She is also an independent curator and writer; her most recent project, Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape, opened at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries and traveled to the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Jennie is based in Los Angeles and serves as a Board Member of Artadia, NYC and Art Omi, Ghent, NY.