“Remixed: Entwined Histories & New Forms”
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA
Remixing transforms the familiar into something new. In the recording studio, music producers layer tracks, shift tempos, and sample old melodies, creating fresh soundscapes with the echoes of the past. Remixed: Entwined Histories and New Forms explores this sonic alchemy as a conceptual, visual strategy in art that “remixes” both physical objects and immaterial legacies.
In this exhibition, materials are conduits for spirit, memory, and history. Artists do not simply use these materials; they listen to them, speaking with, not for, across time and space. Basil Kincaid and Shinique Smith deconstruct and reassemble lived-in fabrics, materials that act as personal archives or, collectively, maps charting lineage. Candice Lin employs culturally and economically resonant natural pigments, tracing their fraught duality as both sacred and commodified. Sabrina Gschwandtner highlights the legacy of women in early cinema by stitching together film footage of a pioneering female animator.
Just as musical remixes blur the lines between eras and genres, these visual remixes challenge divisions of mediums, cultures, and hierarchies of art. Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola “paints” with a swarm of stretched, stitched fabrics, whilst Adia Millet “quilts” with paint. Through quilting, Jeffrey Sincich and Ben Venom soften the abrasive—gritty urban signs and recycled heavy metal apparel, respectively. Jeffrey Gibson and Porfirio Gutierrez synthesize indigenous legacy with radical elements of modern life, finding unexpected cohesion in seemingly distinct cultural motifs.
Like jazz virtuosos improvising upon a classical standard, the artists of Remixed inhabit tradition to radically reimagine it. Through memory-laden materials, they reveal that tradition is neither static nor fixed. It is a living current—pulsing with the insistent collective energy of a bassline; its drift shifted by the remix.
Remixed: Entwined Histories and New Forms will feature works by Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, Carla Edwards, Jeffrey Gibson, Tamara Gonzales, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Basil Kincaid, Maia Ruth Lee, Candice Lin, Yassi Mazandi, Adia Millett, Wendy Red Star, Jeffrey Sincich, Shinique Smith, Michael C. Thorpe, and Ben Venom.