Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Memesis, a solo exhibition of woven works by Los Angeles-based artist Kayla Mattes, who brings a modern sensibility and wit to the traditional art of weaving. Her handwoven tapestries investigate digital forms of expression, drawing from internet memes, symbols, and texts to convey the pervasive anxieties of contemporary life. She tackles themes of environmental crisis, unchecked capitalism, and political upheaval with a humor that allows space for processing and acknowledgement. Mattes marries the grid-based images built out of warp and weft with the pixelated grid of the screens that mediate so much contemporary interaction, furthering the long interconnected history of weaving and technology.

Mattes’s compositions pull inspiration from the bold colors and chaotic aesthetics of the early internet, which she utilizes as a structure for integrating symbols, viral memes, and news of the present day. Her project is archival in nature; she transforms the ephemeral and non-physical, preserving them in weavings that are emphatically grounded and tactile. Mattes archives the evolving interface design and fleeting touchstones of our digital lives. The source material – common signs and symbols, memes – is often overlooked or dismissed as unserious, yet in an increasingly digital world this mode of communication becomes ever more central to our self-expression. Fittingly, tapestry as an artform has long been used to communicate political ideas and to document the current moment, and Mattes brings this history screaming into the 21st century.