Miguel Arzabe creates colorful and dynamic abstractions. He uses paper weavings, paintings, and videos to recover moments of human interconnectedness. He starts by looking outward, finding beauty whose time has passed, such as paper ephemera from contemporary art shows, traditional indigenous textiles, modernist paintings, and discarded audio recordings. They are methodically deconstructed, analyzed, and reverse-engineered. Drawing from the cultural techniques and motifs of his Andean heritage, he weaves the fragments together to produce unlikely intersections between form and content, the nostalgic and the hard-edged, appropriation and authorship, and failure and redemption.

Arzabe’s work has been exhibited in the U.S., Australia, Mexico, Canada, France, among other places. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and lives and works in Oakland, California.

miguelarzabe.net