Caro Campos & Dorothy Li

September 1—30 2023

In Heirloom, Caro Campos and Dorothy Li utilize collage and interdisciplinary creative traditions to reflect on archival absences, mythology, matriarchal lineage, and artifactual assemblage. They embrace intuitive artistic practices—letting the body be a guide for making—by trusting tactile approaches to knowledge production. Both artists generate possibility through resisting societal values centered around perfectionism and narrative closure. Heirloom emerges from ideas of heir/inheritance, to loom as a verb, and the loom as a tool of weaving. What forms, narratives and images are generated in reckoning with the absences inherent in documented and archived histories? What do we inherit from past generations, and what will we choose to take into the future? Heirloom-as-art-object asks the viewer to approach these works as containers of non-linear history, intergenerational collective memory, and as material prologues for future generations. 

Dorothy Li is a visual artist based in Charlottesville, VA. She graduated from UVA in 2022 with a bachelor's degree in Studio Art & Psychology. Through her interdisciplinary painting practice, Li explores creative identity through material cultural histories of silk and personal family history.

Caro Campos is a community organizer & artist based in Charlottesville, VA. She works at Legal Aid Justice Center with people facing acute and structural crises stemming from racial capitalism. Campos uses collage to play through, with, and against assemblages of bordering and what she calls the insurgent subterraneo, a generative site of creative abolitionist place-making. She graduated from UVA in 2022 in Political & Social Thought and Urban & Environmental Planning.

The public can visit the gallery Tuesday-Friday from 11AM to 5PM, and Saturdays 1PM to 5PM.