Abbey Muza is an artist and weaver working in Philadelphia, PA. They received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and are an MFA Candidate and Graduate Fellow in Fibers and Material Studies at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. They have shown at spaces in Chicago including Threewalls Gallery, LVL3, Tusk, and SOFA, as well as elsewhere in the US. In 2017 they received an Artist’s Grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and have been an artist in residence at  Alternative Worksite in Roanoke, Virginia (supported by the Robert Overby  Foundation), and AIR Sefrou outside of Fes, Morocco.

In my practice, I engage material hierarchies through formal arrangement of haptic imagery. I use the loom as a generative tool to create a woven material support for content. Placing the tactile away from the hand, tension develops between what cannot be touched but asks to be. Elsewhere, what desires the eye or the wall will not be given such. I look to develop a poetry of power. 

My work begins as amassed text and imagery broken into cropped parts and phrases. I am often in dialogue with literature and film when making formal decisions or culling words. I collect quotidian fragments of images and language and intuitively arrange them into compositions. Such moments co-mingle with textile to activate the meeting of labor, flesh, and material. 

I use the complex structures of weaving as a scaffold to situate the content of my work, and a  reckoning with material occurs in the process. Weaving allows for integration of content directly into form, by making an image or pattern concurrently with the structure in which it rests. I am attracted to the way the materials of weaving (wool, silk, plastic) pile and form volume and, in this structure, may totally or partially obscure image-based content. Hand-weaving is a method of controlling the bounds of images, hemming in the dimensions of works according to the width of warp, and binding the work against the gridded nature of its structure.