We are pleased to present Foremother, a new solo installation by multidisciplinary, Western Massachusetts-based artist Alyssa Sakina Pheobus.
Dates / November 14, 2026 - January 3, 2027
Foremother, 2014/2026
Low-relief handmade paper assemblage on handloom tussar silk
72 x 60 inches
Imagining the Sampler kiosk gallery as a haunting public wunderkammer (a room of wonder, cabinet of curiosities), Pheobus presents her monumental assemblage of silk and paper as a hovering artifact.
Built layer by layer on the surface of an earlier artwork, Foremother is composed of sedimentary textures that both reveal and conceal a mysterious figure discernible in fragments.
Drawing inspiration from archeological surfaces and burial textiles, Foremother meditates on the fractured and submerged nature of ancestry and inheritance.
Alyssa Sakina Pheobus
Artist Statement
I believe in the agency of objects. Things have the power to push back against us—to transform the spaces they inhabit and the people that encounter them. The longer I work and the deeper my personal archive becomes, the more I appreciate the fact that artworks have bodies, life cycles, travels and personal histories that can be as unpredictable, multivalent, joyful and complicated as our own lived experiences. Like us, objects exist within ecosystems, communities, economies and networks of belief. Recently, I have developed a new working method in which I acknowledge the agency of objects that I once made, released into the world, and then received again in altered forms. Sometimes, after many years of inattention, I ask the thing—what do you want to be now? and accept that it may want something completely different from what I originally intended. Lately, the artifacts and unresolved fragments of my creative practice have been asking for a play of veils—layer by layer, accumulation becomes a metaphor for the shaggy threshold between hiddenness and visibility—withholding and wanting to be known