Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way, presenting new works by Sheelagh Boyce and Annabelle Harty, the artists behind the collective.

Hailing from Glasgow and London respectively, Boyce and Harty have undertaken a half-decade-long project of translating their shared experience of architecture’s sense of place and garments’ sentimentality into quilt installations. At the center of the artists’ work is an interest in how patterns of positive and negative space can shift the way individuals see form.

Taking hundreds of hours of production time, each quilt tells a layered story that combines imagery, memory, and ideas to de-structure formal relationships in a manner that recalls what designer Alan Fletcher describes as “the art of looking sideways”, namely to revisit well-worn paths from new angles in order to see them as if for the first time. The germination of ‘Quilt 42’, ‘Quilt 41’, and ‘Quilt 43’ began with site visits Boyce and Harty made to Arne Jacobsen’s Bellevue Theatre and Jørn Utzon’s Bagsværd Church in Denmark and the Can Lis home in Spain, respectively.

Just as a plan, section, and elevation are methods of imaging the abstractness of space, Boyce and Harty’s architecturally inspired works aim to articulate not only the contours of the buildings’ designs but also the sense of faded optimism the structures’ imparted on the artists during their visits. Accompanying these quilts are two examples of Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way’s longstanding interest in working with garments sourced from a personal collection of clothing from friends and family.

‘Quilt 35’ and ‘Quilt 45’ attend to what might be called the architecture of the clothes people wear, such as a shirt or a pair of gym shorts. The collective’s interest in each garment ranges from the structure of the pattern cutting to its emotional attachment and significance. A shirt worn and loved for reasons, whether for celebration or utility, is taken apart and is then reconstructed to form new narratives. What ties together Boyce and Harty’s studies of buildings and garments is an implicit understanding that things are never just given to be seen as if the individual who examines them is an absent observer.

Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way’s work underscores how people do not merely inhabit the world but rather are literally entangled with it. Unlike the rigid abstractness of architectural renderings, Boyce and Harty’s quilts describe space in a manner that foregrounds individuals affective investments in it. In doing so, the artists’ work translates the hardness of one phenomenal world into the softness of another.