Save the date!
December 6, 6 pm: Itala Aguilera's final performance.
More details soon.
"I think of garments as emotionally charged objects that can tell stories, and I use clothing to explore the concepts of intimacy and sexuality in the context of mundane actions and daily life. I create fictional objects that exist in alternative realities where our garments are a means of revealing one’s inner universe and of creating connections to our surroundings. Since 2023, I have centered my work on finding new ways to undress, which has led me to experiment with different media: electronics, heat-reactive materials, edible materials, water-soluble textiles, performance, and video.
By making garments using soluble, degradable or edible materials, clothes become part of the body that wears them, and undressing is therefore a sort of bodily function or a chemical and biological process—garments are literally digested inside a body or decomposed by the environment.
I usually work with vintage and historical patterns to make my garments, and I am especially drawn to structured and ornate underclothes like corsets, petticoats, and drawers. Combining the traditional ideas of beauty and seduction contained in historical clothing with experimental materials allows me to work with striptease as a genre, to twist and bend it to explore its limits."
Itala Aguilera was born in Mexico City in 1996. After studying Textile and Fashion Design, she worked as a costume designer and developed her practice within the visual arts. Since 2021, she has been part of the artist collective Flux Factory. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico in art spaces such as Islera and El Arenero in Mexico City, and Museo de la Ciudad in Querétaro; in the US in spaces such as Flux Factory and the Textile Arts Center in New York, and Carnation Contemporary in Portland; and in Europe in spaces such as the Forecast Forum in Berlin and Platform in Vaasa. In 2025, Itala was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts grant, sponsored by Flux Factory, with which she produced her upcoming solo exhibition Tierra Mojada (Wet Land), opening November 15 at Flux IV in Long Island City.
We welcome Itala to the studio as our November WIP resident!
You can visit her studio on Sundays from 2pm to 5pm.
Textile Arts Center’s Work in Progress (TAC WIP) is a window into the studio practice of contemporary artists and designers that engages the public in a dialogue with the field of textiles.