About the Exhibition

Andrea Canepa’s installation, As we dwell in the fold, investigates what it means to hide oneself from the gaze of others. The exhibition is a joyful invitation to play, encouraging visitors to hide and seek, with the work both protecting and exposing people in the space. As an immersive, large-scale, wearable installation of metal and fabric sculptures, the piece is designed to be a tactile and experiential work. All objects can be interacted with—crawling under, covering and uncovering, stretching, introducing limbs in unexpected places—wherein visitors alter the space through their experimentation with the many forms.

Andrea Canepa: As we dwell in the fold is the first solo exhibition of Peruvian artist Andrea Canepa in the United States. This new project is in part inspired by Canepa’s research into various protective fabrics and their relation to the body: from funerary bundles of the ancient Paracas culture to tapadas—Peruvian women in colonial Lima who used a veil to cover their faces revealing just one eye—to Sufi whirling and modern-day parachutes. Drawing from ancient rituals and the Andean cultures’ mythology of the underworld and death, Canepa explores how fabrics shape the way we relate our bodies and individual identities. For the artist, fabrics are both protective garments and social constructs. Sometimes weaves can create a cocoon that allows the hidden self to be expressed more freely, and sometimes they are a uniform that cannot be shed. Fabrics both liberate and oppress.

Andrea Canepa: As we dwell in the fold is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University as part of the Artist Project Series and curated by Associate Curator Teresa Fankhänel. Support for this series is provided by the MSU Federal Credit Union. This exhibition is further supported by ifa Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Germany, and Lansing Welding, Inc.

Brochure