ZOE SCHWARTZ: MOTHER MOLD
Open July 13 - August 24, 2023
Zoe Schwartz, Mother Mold I and Mother Mold II, Shells, Glass and Pearls, 2022.
Alanna Miller is pleased to announce Mother Mold, a solo exhibition of work by Zoe Schwartz, opening Thursday, July 13, 2023, from 6-8 pm. Zoe Schwartz presents sculptures of undergarments cast in bronze, glass and pearls fired in shells, and intricately crocheted wire and glass tapestries.
The term “mother mold” is taken from the sculptural process known as lost wax casting, and is defined as the most durable outer shell created when making bronze-cast sculptures. Schwartz likens the idea of the mother mold and lost wax casting alongside metalworking and glass firing techniques to an exercise of body, mind, and spirit that facilitates active healing from matrilineal trauma.
Schwartz’s bronze cast underwear and abstract glass works are an effort to achieve cellular healing through relational aesthetics – or Loob ng Tao, Filipino philosopher Carl Lorenz Cervantes’s idea that the interior self is recognizable only through interaction with others. Schwartz’s installation is a space to meditate on and heal intergenerational trauma.
As a Jewish and Filipina woman, Schwartz is hyperaware of the ultrafeminine archetypes — the Jewish American Princess and the Pinay Beauty Queen — made of her matriarchs through centuries of colonization and a continued, often violent, subjection to the white male gaze.
In Schwartz’s practice, the “mother mold” is not only an object-making tool in the physical sense but also in relation to the palpable effects of generational inheritance. The mother mold provides shape for the wax form to take; an environment for the wax to mirror — much like Schwartz and her matriarchs who have been pressured to conform to white standards of femininity; pressured to become objects as a means of protection and safety.
Throughout this body of work, Schwartz creates objects as a rejection of objecthood. Her newest glass works take on an uncanny cellular quality representative of a new, true inner self she has discovered through the interaction between material and the external world.
About the Artist
Zoe Schwartz is a Jewish-Filipina artist living and working in New York City. Schwartz’s practice explores sculpture utilizing a variety of mediums from bronze to glass, as well as organic matter such as shells and pearls to expand her conceptual practice focused on feminism, matrilineal inheritance, generational trauma, and cellular healing.
Zoe Schwartz received her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Michigan, and in 2023, received her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design.
About Alanna Miller
With over ten years of experience as an art dealer working with private collectors and corporate hospitalities, Alanna Miller is opening a new gallery space at 230 Mulberry Street in New York City, bringing her art advisory expertise to the storefront. The gallery will function as a dynamic, thoughtful space dedicated to emerging art.
Alanna Miller received her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art and the Market from Christie's Education in New York. She was sales assistant to blue chip art advisor Kim Heirston and Sales Director of Artemisa Gallery in New York City, specializing in emerging and contemporary Latin American art. Following her time with Artemisa, she spent several years in the specialized business of fine art licensing with Bridgeman Images. Alanna Miller brings a uniquely and carefully honed perspective into the gallery.