kira dominguez hultgren
class of 2019
about
Kira is a California-based textile artist. She studied French postcolonial theory and literature at Princeton University, and performance and fine arts in Río Negro, Argentina. Her research interests include material and embodied rhetorics, loom technologies, decolonizing material culture, and analyzing textiles as a performative critique against the visual. In her third year at California College of the Arts, Dominguez Hultgren is earning an MFA in Fine Arts and MA in Visual and Critical Studies. Dominguez Hultgren is represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, where she had her first solo show, Wingspan, in 2018. Her thesis advisory committee consists of Michele Carlson, Jacqueline Francis, and Karen Fiss.
Kira’s thesis
Here, and No Further: Material Rhetoric in Loom with Textile
This essay analyzes two textiles through photographic documentation: Loom with Textile attributed to Juanita (Asdzáá Tł’ogi), and the Virgen de Los Caminos by Consuelo Jimenez Underwood. Both of these artists, through textile-actions (weaving and quilting) rupture invisible and yet determinative signs of representation, signs that are used to rationalize Indigenous genocide and to dehumanize those living and dying at the border of nations. This thesis argues for a new analytical methodology, material rhetorical analysis, which can account for these textile-actions as motions that embed counter-narratives into visually identifiable imagery or signs. Current visual analysis within the field of craft and textile studies fails to consider these textile-actions. Textiles are read as visual and conceptual objects, thereby reinforcing the very signs that textile-actions disrupt. Instead, looking to Indigenous Studies for definitions of embodied, material, and multimodal rhetoric, this thesis analyzes textiles and textile-actions as a performative rhetorical critique against the visual.