Frances Trombly: What Holds

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present What Holds, a solo exhibition by Miami-based artist Frances Trombly. Marking Trombly’s return to the gallery following her 2016 solo exhibition, this body of work continues her investigation into weaving, labor, and the structures that make visibility possible.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Leah Ollman described Trombly’s sculptures, weavings, and installations as “confident trespassers,” works that “meander into all sorts of territory, straddling genre lines and tunneling through hierarchical divides.” Nearly a decade later, that trespass has become more deliberate. In What Holds, the works resist a fixed category. They move across painting and sculpture, appearing as supports, tools, remnants, and propositions. The works seem to have arrived from the studio still carrying the pressure of their own making. At the center of the exhibition is the warp, the longitudinal threads that carry tension and give structure to woven cloth. Trombly brings this underlying system forward, where it operates as both subject and support. Warps hang exposed. Textiles slip from wooden frames. Handwoven surfaces are suspended, layered, or left partially formed. The conditions of making are not concealed or smoothed over. They remain. Process is not a step toward something else. It is the work.

Her structures recall looms, stretcher bars, warping boards, and scaffolds. They hold and distribute tension. They point toward painting while refusing the stability of the canvas. They remain tied to the logic of cloth even as they occupy space. In What Holds, Trombly returns painting to its material condition: a woven support shaped by tension, labor, and time.

Layering becomes another way Trombly unsettles the surface. Woven panels, exposed warps, dyed threads, knots, and hanging lengths of fiber overlap without fully resolving into a single plane. Color moves through these structures in washes, bands, and interruptions, recalling painting while remaining bound to the logic of cloth. Depth emerges through accumulation rather than illusion. Each layer stays partially distinct, carrying its own duration, pressure, and trace of handling.

Rooted in textile histories long positioned at the margins, Trombly’s practice attends to forms of labor that remain foundational and often overlooked. Repetition and strain accumulate through the hand. The grid holds the trace of that accumulation. It carries time in a bodily way.

Presented in Los Angeles at a moment defined by ongoing strain, What Holds does not offer spectacle or resolution. It remains with the conditions that sustain it, with the systems that hold under pressure and the labor that keeps them in place. The work turns toward these structures without stabilizing them, allowing their strain and exposure to stay visible. What emerges is not a fixed image but something held in tension, built through contact, and maintained over time.

Frances Trombly lives and works in Miami, where she is the Co-founding Director of Dimensions Variable, a nonprofit exhibition space and studio program dedicated to supporting contemporary art and artists in Miami. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo presentations at Moore College of Art & Design’s Goldie Paley Gallery, Locust Projects, and Girls’ Club Collection. Selected group exhibitions include To Weave the Sky at El Espacio 23, Illusions Are Real at Manif d’art, Québec City Biennale, #Fail at Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, Americana: Formalizing Craft at Pérez Art Museum Miami, and united states at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her work is held in public and private collections, including Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Pérez Art Museum Miami, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, and the Jorge M. Pérez Collection.