Just Friends

In her first engagement with the gallery, Maggie Thompson (Fond du Lac Ojibwe) shares an intimate body of five new works that process love and its aftermaths. Thompson’s multimedia works are known for expanding various textile traditions’ inherited ways of becoming and being. She often supplants natural fibers for the unlikely—such as plastics, bottlecaps, panty hose—while pushing and pulling textiles’ communicative histories and functions, ranging from the exclusively coded to the overtly literal. This experimentation intersects with the artist’s emotional worlds and intuitive ways of learning and knowing. Thompson’s work focuses on specific events of personal loss and grief—from deaths of a parent, relative, and friends, the psychological loss of self in abusive relationships, to her current working—through heartbreak. “Making is a means of processing,” she says. “So much of my work has come from things that are difficult. I often say I hope one day it doesn’t. But for now, I still need my work to quietly give voice to what is hard to talk about. Everyone experiences loss and grief. Normalizing emotions feels like a form of resistance, and gives me and others the opportunity to acknowledge, move-through, and transform—consciously or not.”