Rinehart School of Sculpture MFA Director Dolores Zinny is taking part in a blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore.
Part of the artist duo Zinny Maidagan with Juan Maidagan, the pair’s work can be seen in Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America through March 24. It is the first large-scale museum exhibition to take a comparative approach across Southeast Asia and Latin America, uniquely animated by the struggles against colonialism. The exhibition comprises over 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, performances, and sensorial installations by more than 75 artists, including Zinny Maidagan.
Dolores Zinny for Zinny Maidagan. Tigresses. Handsewn banners and synthetic leather. Juan Maidagan for Zinny Maidagan. Trees. Acrylic on canvas, rubber, and coconut coir rope.
As part of the related research for the exhibition, Zinny Maidagan engaged in conversations with the curatorial team, led by senior curator Mustaffa Shabbir, attending to narratives between the Global South's different regions. They contributed to this large-scale exhibition with the commission Vientos Alisios: Tigresses and Trees, a group of sculptures, poems, drawings, and prints.
In partnership with the National Gallery Singapore, the artworks were fabricated at the Rinehart School of Sculpture, the Fiber Department, and Graduate Research Lab facilities at MICA. Zinny was able to form a fabulous team of fabrication assistants composed of talented MICA students, and alumni including Elena Wallach ’23 (Fiber BFA), Jenelle Legge ’16 (Fiber BFA), and Marty Koelsch ’23 (Rinehart School of Sculpture MFA), who served as project manager.
Tigresses, is proposed as a version of the third tiger mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges's poem The Other Tiger. The orange and yellow hand-dyed cotton geometric design that forms the word Tigresses is disrupted by black faux leather stripes, serving as anchoring points in the courtyard's architecture. With multiple reading points, the artwork uses the feline camouflage mechanism, which in biology is called disruptive coloration.
Trees is comprised of six sculptures made of rolled painted canvas, rubber, and coconut ropes. Beyond metonymy, Trees recall lanterns, seahorses, echinoderms, extractive trade materials, and more.