About the Exhibition
In Torn and Woven, I trace a personal journey through the field of haptics—the sensory knowledge we gain through touch—by challenging the rigid structures of traditional frame loom weaving. My practice, rooted in textile research and its intersections with painting, evolved as I began to explore fabric not only as surface but as structure: a material with depth, memory, and energy.
Weaving became a way to reconnect with ancestral knowledge. The frame loom offered a return to a primal origin, where I realized that any material—once processed into filaments—can be woven, and any surface—once torn—can become warp. This realization opened a space for experimentation beyond pictorial convention, inviting a tactile, sensory approach.
The works in this series are woven from both natural and synthetic fibers, with varying textures, flexibilities, and origins. They speak of transformation—of the tension between destruction and creation, of the act of repurposing, and of the hidden vitality within discarded matter.
Alongside this exploration, I became interested in how textiles might embody energy—not just as material, but as animistic form. This led me to create fiber-based structures inspired by biological teguments: the protective membranes that surround seeds, skins, and plant bodies. These woven “skins” are porous yet containing, gesturing to the unseen forces held within recycled fibers as I imagine it. In this way, the textiles become vessels—encapsulations of life, memory, and renewal.
Torn and Woven is both a material investigation and a sensory mapping. Each piece invites viewers to experience fabric not just as an object, but as a living archive of touch, labor, and transformation.
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Exhibition Gallery
At the Garden 2024
Second-hand table runner with woven reclaimed wool yarns. Stitching.
Interactions 2024
Cotton canvas with woven wool, acrylic yarns, and stitched satin. Stitching.
Interactions II, of whitest whites 2025
Tablecloth scraps with stitched satin and woven reclaimed wool yarn. Stitching.
Pure Energy 2025
Antique handkerchiefs sewn onto cotton canvas scrap with woven wool and acrylic yarns. Stitching.
Stones, Cocoons, or Floating Snails Seashells 2024
Vintage tapestry scrap with woven reclaimed wool yarns. Stitching.
Artist’s Statement
I am a multidisciplinary artist who develops sewn and woven pieces, clothing, and jewelry. Fashion was my first contact with the world of art and creativity, an influence that has transformed into an appreciation for the expressions individuals have through their use of clothing. My main interest is exploring the expanded pictorial language. I use fabric as a medium to explore similarities between painting and textiles, creating abstract compositions I call textile paintings.
Based on this research, I delved deeper into the material aspect of this medium and learned to weave on a frame loom; a technique that allows me to understand its basic structure, composed of the regular and alternating interlacing of threads called warp and weft.
I am drawn to weaving as an ancestral technology. There is a dichotomy between the complexity and simplicity of this technique that I explore. Incorporating it into my work connects me to a sense of historical belonging and has led me to discover the haptic field as the discipline that studies touch and the sensations obtained through it. This is how I understand construction as my form of creation. I am interested in materials and, therefore, my compulsion to work with my hands.
Conceptually, I feel very close to animism as the general belief that all objects, like any element of the natural world, possess a soul. This leads me to a predilection for using reused materials that provide me with the tools to imbue my work of different meanings and create narratives from them. Whether appropriating elements of popular or media culture, or various influences such as music, literature, bright color palettes, or monochromes, different disciplines converge in my work, closing cycles of searches for freedom of expression and its communication.
About the Artist
Oslyn Whizar
Oslyn Whizar Toscano (b. 1977) lives and works in her hometown of Tijuana B. C. She began her art training as a self-taught artist (2000), then studied and earned a degree in fine arts offered by the Autonomous University of Baja California UABC (2003). She attends various courses and has attained diplomas as a complement to her training (2002 to present), such as the expansive graphic workshop with Magali Lara in Tijuana (2006) as well as Writing for Artists with Carmen Cebreros in Tijuana and a jewelry metalsmith workshop with Jorge Anaya Imaz in Mexico City, both in 2017. She also studied Painting, Landscape, and Nude with Fernando Delmar in Tijuana (2013). She exhibited individually Coser y Tejer, a decade in the plastic exercise of Oslyn Whizar, in the international hall of CEART Tijuana (2023); Object of My Desire at the Benjamin Serrano gallery of the Casa de la Cultura of the Municipal Institute of Art and Culture, IMAC, Tijuana (2018); Curious Exaltations at the 206 Arte Contemporaneo gallery in Tijuana (2015); and Punto al Aire at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca (2012). Her work has been exhibited collectively in Being Here With You/Estando Aquí Contigo at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California (2019); in Nasty Woman Mexico at the Museum of Memory and Tolerance in Mexico City (2017); at the sixth edition of Salon ACME in Mexico City (2018); at the San Diego Art Prize: New Contemporaries (2017); as well as at the Material Art Fair in Mexico City and in Shaped in Mexico at the Oxxo Tower in London, England (2016).
Her work is part of the Elias-Fontes collection. Since the pandemic, she has delved deeper into the technique of frame loom weaving and immersed herself in the practice and research of artisanal processes and fiber reprocessing and reuse. She attended workshops with Olivia Arreguin from VICU Textile Lab (2020) and studied Between Fibers and Wool with teachers Rosa Hernandez and Sebastiana Santis at Matiz Estudio in Tijuana (2022). She was awarded the Lustre 2023 residency in Tijuana and attended the residency at Casa T.E.X.E.R.E. in El Tule, Oaxaca. She recently presented her first clothing collection at Tijuana Design Week in collaboration with World Design Capital 2024 and was selected for the Trienal de Tijuana II Internacional Pictorica Tijuana at the Tijuana Cultural Center.