the long celebration + Works on Visual Desire
Rina Angela Reyes
See it On Campus: Level 2
Michael O'Brian Exhibition Commons
Visitor Infothe long celebration
Feel free to leave a message on this google form, as a guestbook is not provided in-person. I’d love to hear your personal connections to my work!
“Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities. Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore. In many desire-based texts … there is a ghostly, remnant quality to desire, its existence not contained to the body but still derived of the body.”
– Eve Tuck, Suspending Damage, 417
the long celebration, 40″ x 38″ , multi layered screen printed quilt, 2025
My practice is rooted in working with familial imagery to critique dominant frameworks of state-run archives of marginalized communities. Influenced by the frameworks from Eve Tuck’s Suspending Damage (2009), I aim to follow her “desire-based” structure which centers joy, leisure, and desire as equally vital and deserving of archival presence.
Using multi-layered, bitmapped, and duotone image reproduction, my work reflects the fragmented, overlapping nature of memory and marginalized histories. The moirèe patterns that result from these processes speak to the different angles of where my family comes from, and the tactility of quilting invites reflection on remembrance quilts to question who is remembered, why, and how.
Details from the long celebration
Works on Visual Desire
Untitled (subdivision), 18.5″ x 12.9″, laser cut organza layered over CMYK silk screen print on paper (2024)
Through the process of colour separation, image reproductions often dissolve into ghostly echoes of their originals–partial, fragmented, and unstable. Rather than seeking fidelity, both memory and the work itself thrive in gaps and illegibility, allowing the image to shift, break down, and reveal qualities born from the layered labour of remembering, and the physical act of making.
In Tandem, 25.2″ x 37″, laser cut ascii image reproduction on paper, mounted on aluminum plate (2024)
Detail, In Tandem
Rejecting the demand to justify remembrance through a display of trauma, my work insists on the value of the mundane, offering an inclusive vision of archival representation of personal and family history.
In the artist’s continuous effort to promote decolonial practices, they stand in solidarity with Black and Indigenous people of colour, and the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice, and Land Back.
