Bringing together the diverse practices of four DMV-area artists, UNFOLD engages with the significance and possibilities of garments beyond their practical and ornamental functions. The works of Hoesy Corona, Elliot Doughtie, HH Hiaasen, and Mojdeh Rezaeipour direct attention toward clothing’s power to expose, conceal, assimilate, distinguish, comfort, alienate, protect, and transform. When “unfolded,” clothing can be understood to mediate connections between public and private, human and non-human, self and other—in effect complicating these binaries. Through sculpture, textiles, drawing, mixed media, and more, UNFOLD positions clothing as a dynamic site of becoming, capable of organizing identities and setting them in motion.

Hoesy Corona is a Queer Latinx artist working in installation, performance, and sculpture. His Climate Ponchos explore the complex relationships between humans and the environment by focusing on the changing climate and its impact on habitation and migration patterns. Corona has exhibited widely in galleries, museums, and public spaces in the United States and internationally, including Eric Dean Gallery at Wabash College (Crawfordsville, IN), The Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, MD), and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC). He is currently a resident artist at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD and a Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center Public Humanities Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries.

Elliot Doughtie is a Baltimore-based artist originally from Dallas, TX. His drawings, sculptures, and installations engage in a desire to form close relationships between objects and the body in proximity to intimate or vulnerable situations. Doughtie received his BA from Tulane University and MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work has been exhibited throughout North America including L’OEil de Poisson (Quebec City, Quebec), Basketshop Galley (Cincinnati, OH), LangerOverDickie (Chicago, IL), Fjord Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), and the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX). He has been awarded a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award and is a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant recipient.

HH Hiaasen is a non-binary, Richmond-based artist whose practice spans textiles, performance, writing, sculpture, and installation. Their work is activated by the exposure of the queer body in public space and its underlying desires, labors, and grief, ventilated by a resilient, queer sense of humor. Hiaasen has performed and exhibited at venues including Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT), The Poetry Project (New York, NY), and the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (New York, NY). Their first art book, published by Press Press in 2019, was collected by the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art Archives. Hiaasen received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Mojdeh Rezaeipour is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist based in Washington, DC who works primarily in mixed media, installation, and film. Her recent research and creative projects are excavations of material memory at the intersection of her own story and a collective diasporic story. She is a graduate of University of California Berkeley, where she studied architecture, and of Alt*Div, an alternative divinity school centering healing justice and art as spiritual practice. Rezaeipour has exhibited nationally and internationally in a wide range of venues from DIY project spaces in Berlin to museums such as The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC). She is currently a Studio Fellow with the Henry Luce III Center for Art and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary.

This exhibition is supported in part by the Maryland State Arts Council (msac.org).