Fibre: CAROLINE ACHAINTRE, JONATHAN ALFARO, GHISLAIN BROWN-KOSSI

CAROLINE ACHAINTRE
JONATHAN ALFARO
GHISLAIN BROWN-KOSSI
Fibre

Exhibition: Apr 29 – May 24, 2025
Hours: Tues – Sat, 12-5 PM

Wil Aballe
1375 Railspur Alley, Vancouver, BC

For inquiries please contact Wil Aballe, wil@waapart.com

Material conversations float through space between the works of Caroline Achaintre, Jonathan Alfaro, and Ghislain Brown-Kossi. Time, texture, and tactility ground these artists’ exploration of visual language, histories, and craft, through a multiplicity of detailed processes. Fibre becomes the medium through which they inhabit unique visual threads to highlight an array of tangible histories.

French-born artist Ghislain Brown-Kossi weaves together an understanding of pattern and communication through symbols in relief, painting references to ancestral African patterns which are iterated, commodified, and integrated into contemporary society. With a background in fashion, Kossi uses bold colours and repetition to define the materiality of textile as language, investigating cultural opacity through textural legibility.

Jonathan Alfaro is a queer, LatinX interdisciplinary artist who similarly explores language through an intertwined relationship of writing and textiles. His practice asks us to embrace ambiguous fields of colour with curiosity, in order to seek understanding through abstraction. Alfaro’s work is made through processes of weaving and bleaching yarn, which questions the material’s surface and capacity to translate. The result is fibre that reads as both textile and painting.

Fragmented threads and views are explored in the work of French-German multimedia artist Caroline Achaintre. Her hand-tufted wool tapestry drapes off of itself creating an abstracted image with both invitation and repulsion. Achaintre’s research gathers multiple strings of reference which identify a dynamic between the ancient and modern, where her work uses this to reframe soft textile into differing fused narratives. The work stitches together scenes that take on a life of their own.

Fibre as an enigmatic medium in multi-purposed states builds a visual language with wonder and surprise. It preserves the labour of material exploration, while revealing new visual dynamics through reconnected use and intent. This ultimately magnifies moments where communication happens on the grounds of tactile sensibility, bringing into question an unbound breadth in the fibres of understanding.