Stretch, Hold, Release
September 18 – November 8, 2025

Elisa Lutteral, Lior Modan, JaLeel Marques Porcha, Luis Emilio Romero, Terumi Saito

Picture Theory is pleased to announce Stretch, Hold, Release, a group show highlighting the interchange of cultural memory and fiber-based materiality. As the title suggests—these emerging contemporary artists root their creative practices within the field of fiber arts, situating these continuous hand-making processes within the greater poetic capacity for textiles to transmute ways of knowing–not from static categorization, empiric knowledge, or documented traditions–but as dynamic flows cresting precisely across unified mental and bodily systems.  

Exploring craft heritage from Indigenous Guatemalan weaving traditions and South East Asian ikat dyed weaving techniques, Luis Emilio Romero and Terumi Saito expand the rigorous iconography of each’s inherited material wisdom reflecting the artist’s hybrid perspectives within our globalized world. Undeniably distinct cultural markers of localized wisdom traditions, Romero and Saito each overlay these techniques with an additional unexpected process in their work allowing confrontations of each piece’s objecthood to evade stringent categorization, therefore offering instead aesthetic harmonies that triumph over pedantic museology.

Text by Carson Woś – Read more on picturetheoryprojects.com