A compelling textile exhibition at Tempest Gallery, located on the border between Ridgewood and Bushwick, transforms a quiet industrial-commercial neighborhood into a journey through mountaintops and surreal landscapes. The show, titled "It must be nice to fall in love," features intricate manipulations of thread and fabric by three contemporary artists: Raisa Kabir, Katherine Earle, and Leila Seyedzadeh, creating immersive conversations about climate change and shifting cultural identities.
Each artwork in the exhibition simultaneously embraces and challenges the rigid constraints of the gallery's white walls and concrete floors, forming both familiar and innovative landscapes from every viewing angle. The works utilize textile as a möbius strip medium, creating continuous loops of meaning that transport viewers beyond the gallery's physical boundaries.
Iranian artist Leila Seyedzadeh's installation "Mapping the air through its peaks" (2025) commands attention with flexible poles that suspend draped summits and fringed slopes, creating a surreal and practically weightless mountain range. The translucent paisley-printed fabric draws from her childhood memories of playing beneath her mother's chador namazes (prayer veils), while the elegant hand-dyed fringe echoes the tasseled edges of traditional Persian carpets. Referencing the multidimensional perspectives found in Persian Negārgarī paintings, Seyedzadeh's installation evokes the Alborz mountain range that formed the backdrop of her upbringing in Tehran.
Adjacent to the gallery's entrance, Seyedzadeh's "Threads of Longing" (2025) continues exploring multidimensionality through a floating, warped strip of sky-blue fabric suspended below a plane. This piece deliberately flips the viewer's sense of up and down, jumbling the conventional understanding of spatial reality and presenting life from a 360-degree perspective that challenges traditional orientations.
Katherine Earle's wall hangings, positioned at the back of the gallery, create subtle movements when visitors pass by, stirring delicately in the displaced air. Displayed in a row of three pieces, Earle's cotton and silk works function as deliberate yet anxious contemplations on humanity's role in creating disposability within the natural world. Her leftmost piece, "Languages die like rivers" (2025), presents a dyed batik stretch of blood-red cotton featuring minute embroideries that speak to what has been lost or altered beyond the point of recovery on both anthropological and ecological scales.
The central piece, "Fault Lines" (2025), demonstrates Earle's continued fascination with materials that connote obsolescence and abandonment in the wake of progress. This silk work is both dyed and printed with rust, creating visual metaphors for decay and industrial remnants. Colorful and metallic threads snake within their confinement inside the printed shapes, reintroducing the limitations of human craftsmanship into the automated labor of silkworms and machines. The rightmost piece, an untitled rust-printed silk square from 2025, translates visually as scabbed-over scrapes and cuts, suggesting healing processes and permanent scarring.
Raisa Kabir, a Mancunian artist of Bangladeshi heritage based in London, guides audiences through a complex history of imperial trauma interwoven with anti-colonial resistance. Her work addresses multiple layers of historical violence and cultural disruption, including the British imperial violence that proved inextricable from Bangladesh's formation and the subsequent civilian migration into the United Kingdom. She also examines the disruption and devaluation of the South Asian textile industry through industrialization and trade policies, as well as the hierarchical structures that developed within the British textile industry.
Kabir's woven pattern tapestries incorporate four-way mirrored Bangla characters rendered in black, white, and red. These characters appear clear and legible in certain areas before floating wefts stretch and distort them, ultimately rupturing completely into cascading, bleeding tangles of loose threads. The pieces include "Lift the Veil and See our Silent Language" (2013) and "Your untangled threads reveal me" (2013), both of which demonstrate her technique of controlled deterioration.
The delicate tapestries function as abstracted archives that document colonial and post-colonial bloodshed, examining the loss of culture and history through diaspora and the painful fragmentations of families, societies, traditions, and economies. More importantly, however, they actively reclaim and reinterpret Bangladesh's cultural heritage with profound agency and urgency, transforming historical trauma into contemporary artistic resistance.
The exhibition creates meaningful dialogues between the three artists' works, with each piece informing and enhancing the others through shared themes of displacement, memory, and material transformation. The textile medium serves as both subject and method, allowing each artist to explore how cultural identities are woven, stretched, and sometimes torn apart by historical forces and personal experience.
"It must be nice to fall in love" continues at Tempest Gallery, located at 1642 Weirfield Street in Ridgewood, Queens, through November 1. The exhibition demonstrates how contemporary textile art can address urgent global concerns while maintaining intimate connections to personal and cultural histories.
