Take what you have, make what you need brings together Claudia Gutierrez and Guillermo Trejo in a shared exploration of material constraint, authorship, and cultural inheritance. Both artists embrace imperfect processes such as stitching, dyeing, cutting, and printing as a means of resisting systems rooted in standardization, industrial precision, and colonial modernism. Gutierrez’s stitched compositions reflect the domestic histories of textile, transformed by improvisation, repetition, and the embodied realities of caregiving. Trejo interrogates the failures of architectural modernism in Latin America, using serialized mark-making and geometric distortion to expose the gap between imported ideals and lived experience. Across both practices, the hand disrupts the machine, and imperfection becomes an act of refusal. Whether in stretched threads or warped grids, the works trace a visual language of adaptation, where scarcity becomes generative and the act of making becomes a negotiation between memory, labour, and the structures we inherit or resist.
Gallery Website: https://demontignycontemporary.com/
Gallery Address: Suite 101, 858 Bank Street, Ottawa