Cassandra Mayela Allen. Desahogando: Undrowning

About

Olympia is pleased to present Desahogando: Undrowning, Cassandra Mayela Allen’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a constellation of quilts, weavings, and works on paper, Mayela Allen uncovers the socio-economic conditions of migrant communities in New York City and how these invisible structures persist throughout the United States.

Barber shops, bodegas, and beauty salons are cultural abodes of aesthetic becoming. Simultaneously, these spaces perpetually shape-shift to keep up with the demands of gentrification— altering their appearances and offerings to cater beyond their immediate demographic. 

Mayela Allen threads these urban iconographies together to critique the accelerated lifecycle of commercial consumption and Western ideologies. By integrating donated clothing and upcycled fabrics, Mayela Allen challenges us to stretch resources to their fullest potential.

For the past decade, Mayela Allen has created site-specific bodies of work that directly convey her own experiences of forced migration as well as the larger Venezuelan migrant crisis. Her geographically grounded Maps of Displacement weaves from clothing formerly worn by Venezuelan migrants. In addition, with each item that is donated, Mayela Allen interviews the donor to further trace their migratory experience of displacement. 

Developing out of this emotionally laborious and physically demanding practice, Mayela Allen centered the Spanish concept of "desahogar," meaning “to vent” or "undrown." First by creating a series of color studies on paper, and then by transforming these formations into larger textiles, which can similarly be read as maps. 

In Health is Wealth, an assemblage of white models and beauty salon stock images articulate Western standards of beauty, disregarding the salons’ immediate community and actual patrons. Hall of Fame honors individuals who have been caught on tape stealing necessities from a bodega in Queens, New York. The work is both comical and disturbing, recognizing the conditions that, by design, lead to the necessity of stealing items as basic as nail clippers. These new works build upon the past, recognizing quilt-making’s long history of communicating important coded messages often in plain sight. The concept of "undrowning" forms the foundation of this thread, suggesting that the aftermath of heartbreak holds a mysterious transformative quality of healing and protection. Furthering Mayela Allen’s approach of holistic multiplicities, quilts are functional objects that provide warmth and shelter. 

At the beginning of 2024, Mayela-Allen was awarded a four-month artist residency at the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation in Detroit, Michigan. With its significant history of industrial boom, economic decline, and ongoing urban renewal, Detroit prompted Mayela Allen to ask an important question that underscores  the exhibition: ‘Who are these developers serving?’

Written in partnership with Fabiola R. Delgado