Upcoming Exhibitions

Funding for this exhibition at UNCW’s CAB Art Gallery is supported by UNCW’S Seahawks Advancing Interdisciplinary Learning (SAIL) and UNCW’s Department of Art and Art History.

BIO:

Jovencio de la Paz (b. 1986, Republic of Singapore) lives and works in Eugene, Oregon. de la Paz received a Master of Fine Art in Fibers from the Cranbrook Academy of Art (2012) and a Bachelor of Fine Art with an emphasis on Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2008).

They have exhibited work in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, most recently at the Museum of Art and Design in New York, NY; PPOW Gallery in New York; NY, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles; Cranbrook Museum of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI; R & Company Gallery in New York, NY; Vacation Gallery in New York, NY; The 2019 Portland Biennial at Oregon Contemporary in Portland, OR; The Museum of Craft and Folk-art in Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, CO; Seoul Arts Center, Seoul, South Korea; The Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Uri Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, Slash Gallery in Seattle, WA; the 2024 Immigrant Artist Biennial in New York; the ICA at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, PA; among others.

In 2022, de la Paz was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship for their significant contributions to the field of weaving.

They are represented by Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles, California.

Jovencio de la Paz is an Associate Professor and Head of Fibers at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon USA.

Artist Statement:

“My work and research is situated within the unfolding relationship between ancient weaving technology (the loom) and modern computers. I approach this intersection as a traditionally trained weaver, but also as a digital native. Sharing the same language of binary code, I see this relationship as both fraught and fruitful. Using the digital TC2 (Thread Controller 2) Jacquard loom, I manipulate, hack, confound, and fracture design software to explore and test the boundaries of how cloth is typically conceived. I push design software to the point of rupture or failure, capturing the physicality of these behaviors as the warp and weft of hand-woven textiles.

The resulting weavings often display frenzied patterns: distorted, agitated, or corrupted. I revel in the conflicts that arise between the digital and the physical, between traditional forms and emerging technologies, and I am always sensitive to the presence of the ghosts in the machines I use. Additionally, I work to create new software, drawing tools, and self-generating, parametric systems that employ “computational creativity” to make weaving patterns independently from a human designer. My visual language relinquishes much formal determination to the algorithmic operations I choose. I collaborate with this computational creativity to weave cloth that is neither entirely human nor completely machine in origin. What emerges is often an alien visual language, a vernacular of line, color, and shape that surfaces from the interior, computer world of algorithms. Ultimately, I am interested in the soft world of machines and their programming, obscured by the rigidity of technocracy and the structures of capital; a queer and cyborg theory emerges from the intimacy of dissecting the machine or electing programs as collaborators. I question the subject/object relationship generally established between maker and tool, and I contemplate the possibility that tools form the maker as much as they are wielded, teaching their users what is possible within their disciplines, and physically influencing the products and outcomes of the studio.

Speaking in the vernacular of geometric abstraction, color, composition, line, and the formal concerns of painting are at the forefront of my process. And yet, I diverge from individualistic decision making: first by employing the strict parameters of the loom, and secondly by the algorithmic properties of the software I engage. The loom is an engine of abstraction, condensing the physical, material world into the grid and its intellectual and cultural order. And yet this order can also be tested, ruptured, or un-made, a process of loosening or reversal not available to the material of paint, which undergoes irreversible chemical transformation. Thread can always be unwoven, and I emphasize this looseness, erratic and irregular as it may be, to resist the fixity and stasis associated with the picture plane of Modernity. Thread, which is the vehicle of color in my practice, betrays the illusionistic quality of the painted image. From a distance, threads appear as fields of color, but on close inspection the objecthood of the phenomenon of color becomes self-evident. Each discrete thread remains an identifiable and unique physical instance despite its place in the matrix of the cloth.” 

www.jovenciodelapaz.com

www.chrissharpgallery.com

Press Release

Senior Exhibition is a capstone requirement for all UNCW seniors graduating with a major in Studio Art.

Shabnam Jannesari is a distinguished Iranian artist whose work has been widely exhibited across the United States and internationally. She earned her Master of Fine Arts (MFA), with honors, from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Her solo exhibition She Sat Where the Light Awaited is on view at the Erie Art Museum (Erie, PA) from September 2025 through March 2026. Recent exhibitions include Made in the Plains at the Joslyn Art Museum (Omaha, NE, 2025) and Look but Look with Love, a two-person show at the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY, 2024).

She has presented solo exhibitions such as Each String is a Thread, Each Color a Chord at the Nebraska Arts Council (Omaha, NE) and The Carpet Grew Like a Garden at Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions including the Mid-Atlantic Biennial at the University of Mary Washington (VA), A Pot Nudged into Oblivion at Miranda Art Project Space (NYC), Narrative Imperative at the University of Connecticut, and Domestic State at Wheaton College (MA).

Her paintings are held in both private and institutional collections, including Fidelity Investments and the University of Massachusetts School of Law.

Jannesari’s work explores the struggles and resilience of Iranian women, addressing themes of identity, memory, and societal expectation.

She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2020, 2022) and the Distinguished Art Fellowship at UMass Dartmouth (2018–2021). In 2025, she was selected for the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency.

She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

www.shabnamjannesari.com 

Senior Exhibition is a capstone requirement for all UNCW seniors graduating with a major in Studio Art.