Reimagining cultural archetypes, myths and symbols, Miruna Drǎgan creates artworks that offer themselves as tools for meta/physical exploration. In her rug weavings titled Visitation, Drǎgan reinterprets a traditional Romanian motif, expanding on the cross-cultural allegory of the tree of life. The image of the tree as axis mundi - a channel connecting all layers of life and death from the underworld to the heavens - appears around the globe, predating Christianity and the Roman conquest of the Dacian people living before the common era on what is now the territory of Romania. Ever since, folk crafts have captured related spiritual and popular beliefs in material forms, from embroidered clothing to carved wooden gates, infusing the sacred into the everyday. A symbol of the cyclic continuum of existence, the mythical tree is said to contain within its fruit or sap a miraculous elixir that bestows eternal life.
Using a loom she built into a log wall of her house, Drǎgan painstakingly wove this new series of rugs in white cotton over several months, then poured cyan, magenta and yellow dyes over this blank canvas, irreversibly changing it in a matter of hours. Chance was allowed to determine an outcome to which Drǎgan responded, intently slowing down again. To reinforce the tree's phytomorphic geometries, she superimposed Romanian Stitch embroidery - a technique in which one long suture is held in place with a diagonal one, creating a central ridge. The taut, tertiary colour stitches against the bleeding dyes amplify the tension between fluidity and rigour, suspending chaos and control in a visual stalemate.
In her new watercolour collages, Solar Sail, Drǎgan unfolds three-dimensional pyramidal forms, mapping each of the geometric body's facets onto a two-dimensional plane with individual painted paper pieces at one-to-one scale. The deconstructed sculptures reference gessoed wood models originally made by Jason de Haan to visualize his series of hummingbird feeding stations called Structures for Observing Atypical Flight. When vertically mirrored, these models form oblong bodies reminiscent of birds in flight, similar to Romanian folk motifs that inspired Brâncuşi.
Manifold allusions underlie these deceptively abstract compositions. The title, Solar Sail, evokes a method of spacecraft propulsion that harnesses sunlight using large, ultra-thin, reflective sheets. The wings of hummingbirds contain colours beyond our visible spectrum and, as light shines through their outspread iridescent feathers, one can imagine them to also be propelled by the sun. Then a deeper reference yet surfaces: Drǎgan's near-death, childhood experience, which she describes as being pulled outside of time, suspended in a still and peaceful orbit above the Earth, and seeing a simultaneous mosaic of countless images of her lived experience. And so, shimmering solar sails, hummingbird wings and life after death become subjective associations that articulate finite geometries suggestive, once more, of the infinite.
Applying physics and mathematics to conceive a network of relations, Drǎgan's patterns hold the potential to endlessly expand in all directions. The overall aesthetic of her collages evokes traditional craft, while a vibrational tension between luminous colour and exacting structure connects them to the dyed weavings both formally and conceptually. The logic of these series of works relies on a combination of predetermined structure and anarchic risk, containment and limitlessness, suggestive of the workings of life itself. Shaping a dialogue with her cultural inheritance, Drǎgan creates enchanted objects that link past and present cosmologies, weaving the world anew.
~Mona Filip (Curator, Contemporary Calgary)
