Jemima Wyman
COLA 2025
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
17 Jul – 30 Aug 25
Selected Works
Dropdown IconSelected Works

Pattern Ecologies (in chronological order: (Fish suit) ‘Friday For Future’ climate change protester, Barcelona, Spain, 27 September 2019; (Peacock mask) ‘Extinction Rebellion’ protester advocating for the government to budget for climate justice, Dublin, Ireland, 8 October 2019; (Shark mask) Protester advocating for climate justice during the G7 summit, Falmouth, England, 11 June 2021 and (Sea Horse garment) ‘Earth Day’ protester, Boston, US, 22 April 2024.
2025
Digital photograph and fabric hand-cut
96.5 × 66 cm

Exhibition Text

The interconnectedness that pattern provides across the fields of biological camouflage, the environment, textiles and protesters’ collective motifs is the basis of this new series of works by Jemima Wyman for COLA 25 at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Wyman has made a series of four large-scale textile works and two smaller photographic-based works. The works were created using improvisational screen-printing techniques, custom textile printing, and wallpaper vinyl. Returning to her MAS archive (started in 2008, a collection of online images of protesters using camouflage, including masking, patterned textiles, and smoke), she pulled images related to Climate Crisis protests, where hand-painted motifs and blue were present. One example of this in the exhibition is Rise and fall and rise…(unabridged title is 354 words) a 366 × 518cm work of custom screen printed textiles chronicling different motifs of water used in global Climate Crisis protests, including recent protests related to toxic waste from the recent fires in Los Angeles that Wyman participated in, all events are listed in the title. These images and others were the foundation for the various works, along with an interest in what the protesters are advocating for: a future hope that connects a collective human wish with water, earth, animals and air. The protesters often paint themselves with blue-green earth, tears, eyes on their hands, or as animals. There is a transformative psychedelic feel to the protesters' choices of painterly marks, and their wishes for our current moment of polycrisis. We are in an unsettling time of polycrisis whereby one cannot predict the pattern of knock-on effects from one crisis to the next.

The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery is pleased to present COLA 2025, the artist exhibition of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Independent Master Artist Project (COLA IMAP) Grant Program. COLA 2025 marks the twenty-eighth edition of the COLA IMAP Grant Program, celebrating the creative visions of nine exceptional Los Angeles-based artists in visual, literary, and performing arts.

Jemima will debut a number of bold, large-scale works under the grant fellowship program.

Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the Indigenous People of this land, the traditional custodians on whose Country we work, live and learn. We pay respect to Elders, past and present, and recognise their continued connection to culture, land, waters and community.

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