Tango..beef...fiber art? For over 30 years textile art has been a sustained and growing movement in Argentina. Early pioneers in this field pushed the boundaries from traditional tapestry to experimental constructions and fought hard to legitimize work that often fell stigmatized between art and craft. Today while more and more artists embrace textiles as a soft medium suitable for expressing a unique conceptual statement, many other artists deploy traditional textile techniques to create fluid expressions from hard materials. But wait...isn't that what's happening in the U.S.? Here we present a brief overview of contemporary work from Argentina.

Leo Chiachio & Daniel Giannone collaboratively embrace the traditionally female craft of embroidery to create fanciful dioramas that recontextualize portraits from the familiar domestic sphere. They portray themselves, a male couple with a dachshund son, in a variety of scenarios derived from cultural myths and legends.

Laura González Stutz explores the yin and yan of conflicting emotions as she develops her structural forms. Through her manipulations, metal wire is both hard and soft, rigid and fluid.

Tana Sachs utilizes handmade paper to create haunting fragmented figures that evoke remembrances of things past. Her assemblages often include bits and pieces of historical ephemera that provide clues to dancing, walking, resting, and other moments of life.

In contrast to the moody, complex work of Sachs, Andrea Cavagnaro's work explodes with bold color. Dissonant combinations of synthetic felt proclaim a visual language of sound bites reminding us that "all love is powerful" (todo amor es poderosa) and we must breathe to live ("inhale exhale").

Mirta Zak is interested in "the relation of man to his self created environment." She exploits the industrial, malleable, and "cold" elements of wire as an opportunity to aesthetically draw off the page into three dimensions resulting in illusory shifts and an intriguing sense of motion.

Finally, Carola Segura uses humor and irony as a lens for viewing human behavior. Seemingly unpleasant and contrasting elements are incorporated into allegorical reference as a way to understand and reflect on the difficulties of contemporary life.

Enjoy this opportunity for armchair travel to Argentina and as always, we encourage your comments.