The final exhibit of Chicago Public Library's 2024-2025 Arts and Music department Call for Artists cycle, In the Delicate Meshes by Vanessa Filley, opens December 22, 2024 on the 8th floor of Harold Washington Library Center. The show features drawings, mixed-media sculptures and paintings in watercolor and thread.
Vanessa Filley is a mixed-media artist interested in the energetic threads that orient and connect us, the lines that bring us home. Her work ranges from large scale sculptural installations to tiny embroidery pieces to poems, photographs, and drawings in watercolor, colored pencil and thread. Her themes include the vastness and interconnectivity of space, cosmic patterns, and the ties that bind us to each other.
"I have always loved the scientific premise that we are all stardust ever shifting and sloughing off, constantly being remade, a galaxy in miniature," says Filley. "This body of work...attempts to explore some aspect of existence that is beyond the sense of being an individual." She also draws on the tradition of women artists and craftspeople, many of whom have gone unrecognized.
Filley was voted one of Photolucida’s Top 50 in 2018 and has shown work nationally and internationally including at the Sonoma County Museum of Art, Berlin Photography Week, the Lishui International Photography Festival, FOCUS PhotoLA, Stricoff Gallery, Galerie Joseph Turene, Western Michigan University, The Nashville Public Library, The Affordable Art Fair, Arbor3Arts, Vivid Gallery, the US Consulate General in Saudi Arabia and as a part of Cosmic Geometries at Secrist Beach.
In the Delicate Meshes will be on display from December 22, 2024 until February 1, 2025 in the display cases on the 8th floor of the Harold Washington Library Center.
