Tala Worrell: Down the Line
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COMA is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Lebanese- American artist Tala Worrell (b. 1991, New York) titled Down the Line, on view 24 May – 22 June, 2024. This is the artist’s first solo presentation with COMA and taking place at our Chippendale location, 2/27-39 Abercrombie Street, Chippendale, NSW, 2008.
Down the Line navigates Worrell’s multiple emotional realities; making a new home in Los Angeles, conflict in the middle east, and her memories of New York, Providence, Beirut and Abu Dhabi. Worrell acknowledges painting as an innately introspective experience, a process through which an individual can come to terms with the complexities of themselves and a diverse set of values or opposing ideals. Through her abstract and gestural practice, Worrell negotiates the relationships between various parts of herself. East and West, religious and secular, psychological and somatic – every aesthetic decision attempting to locate equilibrium.
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Tala Worrell
Pashas Tent, Words From Lebanon, Gaza Surf Club, Surfing, 2024
oil, Flashe, pencil, and rice flour on canvas
162.5 x 213.5 cm 64 x 84 inThese grids draw inspiration from Tatreez, traditional Palestinian cross-stitch. Worrell grew up surrounded by tatreez, on pillows, tablecloths, throws and robes, items she has carefully carried with her each time she has relocated – “In a strange way, the ongoing war in Gaza combined with being in a new city and trying to find my way pushed me to find a way to incorporate tatreez in my work. It helped relieve my existential anxiety, anxieties about preserving language, culture, and food.”
In The Other Side of America, Tall Palms, a pattern in deep red, a characteristic colour of tatreez, moves up and down the centre of the canvas in a rhythmic dance, like the sewing of a needle. Worrell’s geometric grid and line work threads in and out of the image, oscillating. There is a sentiment or feeling of labour, a manual push and pull of material restraint and aesthetic desire that calls to the history of tatreez, a textile used, worn and passed down through hands as heirlooms, memories and momentums – an otherworldly feeling that a tablecloth or pillow can make Worrell feel at home anywhere in the world.
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Coinciding with the making of a painting, Worrell often seeks out physical activities outside of the studio that challenge her understanding of movement. In New York it was salsa dancing, most recently it has been horse riding and currently she has taken up surfing, each new activity anchoring the artist to a physical place and experience, and more importantly balancing the idea of structure, through routine and repetition, and letting go. The high arches of blue paint in Pashas Tent, Words From Lebanon, Gaza Surf Club, Surfing, are reminiscent of a wave, each gesture a reference to Worrell’s own quotidian physical and visual encounters, the movement of the line mimicking the carving of a wave. “The one thing I feel about surfing that is different is that the scale is magnified because of the ocean. So, all the elements of unpredictability, force, danger, speed, gravity, orientation, disorientation, pleasure, focus, movement are exponential because I am building a relationship with something that is so much larger than myself.” These elements are then distilled in her images with a hyper-focused sense of awareness to the feelings attached to these moments, informing her sensibility with kinetic resonance, non-verbal communication, balance and rhythm.
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