Winnie Sidharta //
Crossing Spaces
On View: March 20 – May 27, 2025
Opening reception: April 3, 6:30 - 8pm
In Crossing Spaces, Winnie Sidharta explores the visual possibilities and allegorical nature of painting and collage by instilling personal memories, oral histories, and a search for the ideal. Batik, woven bamboo mats, decorative tiles, and andesite (volcanic rock) carvings are just a few examples from centuries of craft practices reflected in Sidharta’s work. Her fascination with the artistry culture of East Java, stems from her childhood having grown up there. The work itself is made of painted paper pulp, clay, wood, and plaster that, together form a composite from multiple fragments. Because the work is collapsible and can be reorganized, it often finds new contexts within the space where it is shown. This freedom of rearranging fragments, edges, and places of rupture also similarly evokes the nonsensical or even poetic aspect of wordplay and rhythm present within language.
For Sidharta, like many of us, looking at paintings is a memory-evoking experience. It is the potential for a painting to become a wondrous portal that allows for crossings between time and space, between the inner mind and the physical world. Audiences become observers and conjurers confronting, finding associations, and probing as they stand in front of an altar space or peer through a physical screen, through which paintings take form.
Crossing Spaces thus becomes a work that captures the artist’s desire to constantly find a new form where identity is in constant flux, but its impulse is held within the boundaries of materials and the site where it is shown. To Sidharta, the discoveries of painting and collage ultimately act as a conduit for endless perceptual encounters, complex cultural experiences, and a material locus for wonder.
Courtesy of Deanna Evans Project