SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Jessica Silverman presents “The Shape of Dusk,” a solo exhibition of new sculptures by Michelle Yi Martin, a Bay Area artist and experimental weaver, on view from March 5 through April 18, 2026.
Yi Martin’s first solo show with the gallery features free-floating and wall-hung multimedia sculptures that inhabit suspended moments—where light becomes dark and gravity meets weightlessness. The play of air and shadow, along with the viewers' movements, animates the real life of these three-dimensional works.
Yi Martin creates her work on a floor loom, combining copper, nettle, silk, wool, horsehair, paper, and nylon fishing line into intricately structured artworks. Using fibers sometimes finer than human hair, she often works by touch rather than sight, relying on embodied memory. The process requires both mathematical precision and intuitive responsiveness, reflecting the dual intellectual and sensory demands of her artistic practice.
Yi Martin’s sculptures are rising and falling presences, always metaphors of metamorphosis. Whether hanging freely in space or hung off the wall, the works respond to subtle air currents and shifting illumination, casting shadows that function as secondary works. Though individually fragile, the fibers gain strength through interdependence, building structures that hold tension, vulnerability, and resilience together.
Threshold (2025) is a slender, spiraling sculpture composed of jute, horsehair, nylon, paper, and silk, which is simultaneously skeletal and protective. Nightfall (2025) consists of a dense internal core enveloped by a translucent veil, suggesting a body emerging—or dissolving—in the light. Meanwhile, Sundown (2026) uses a red metallic thread to evoke the sun's chroma on the horizon, translating an ephemeral phenomenon into a lasting tactile form.
With a vocabulary distinctly her own, Yi Martin's works invite comparison with Ruth Asawa's biomorphic wire sculptures and Alexander Calder's kinetic mobiles, while her feminist engagement with textiles aligns her with artists such as Rosemarie Trockel and Sheila Hicks. Throughout “The Shape of Dusk,” Yi Martin asks us to stop treating change as something to endure and to start living it the way light glimmers in the last minutes of the day.
Michelle Yi Martin (b. 1977, Seoul, South Korea) received an MA from the University of San Francisco and a BA from Santa Clara University. In 2025, she received the Artadia San Francisco Bay Area Award and has a forthcoming residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2023 she was a SECA award nominee. Other residencies and awards include The Space Program, San Francisco; Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT; and Textile Center of Iceland, Blonduos. Yi Martin has participated in recent institutional exhibitions at Bolinas Museum, CA; Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark; Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco; Monterey Museum of Art, CA; Syracuse University Museum of Art, NY; Berkeley Art Center, CA; and Black Mountain College Museum, Asheville, NC, among others. She has a forthcoming public commission at Pier 70, San Francisco. She lives and works in San Francisco, CA.
