Deli Gallery is pleased to announce If I Could by Sarah Zapata. The exhibition is the artist's first solo show with the gallery and contains seven new sculptures presented within a site-specific installation.

Zapata’s practice examines her position in society through the use of time based historical processes: a symbiotic practice of textile making and writing. If I Could employs traditional crafts used by women in a monumental, abstract manner, to be a tactile embodiment of gender and cultural performativity.

Named after "El Condor Pasa (If I could)", a 1970 song that employs American folk and traditional Andean sensibilities, the exhibition invokes the same synthesis of cultures drawing influences from traditional American rug making and Peruvian hand weavings. Through examining her cultural identity as a Peruvian-American woman, her sculptures employ labor-intensive hand processes that point to the eroticism and dynamism of women. Visitors are able to enter the space only after they have become barefoot, as a tantalizing ritual to changing space and mind through humility.
If I Could displays an environment to engage with other individuals through the intersection of material and mutual experience. In conjunction with the exhibition, Zapata has curated a reading and performance event taking place on Sunday, March 19th, including Andrea Arrubla, Kayla Guthrie, Monica Mirabile, and LA Warman.


If I Could is supported in part by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, the Ford Foundation, Southwest Airlines, and the Surdna Foundation through a grant from the NALAC Fund for the Arts.