Panda Landa "Portal X" Hand-Dyed Fabric, Mini Sun Dome Textile Art in Apricot and Cream, California Desert Art, Original 10 X 10 Inches, 2024

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In this small sun dome textile piece in hand-dyed fabric by California desert artist Panda Landa, a pale cream ground … Read more In this small sun dome textile piece in hand-dyed fabric by California desert artist Panda Landa, a pale cream ground holds a broad dome of apricot cloth, mottled with deeper orange where the dye pooled and cut across its lower third by a straight band of terracotta. Below it, a tan strip anchors the composition like a strip of desert floor. The shape is a half sun at the horizon, simple enough to read from across a room and detailed enough, up close, to show cloudy dye and small stitched seams. Panda Landa grew up among the quiet, open landscapes of the Nevada desert and draws on their color and mood, and this small panel is that sunset-hour palette in cloth. It is stretched over bars and left unframed.

A sunrise in a small square, good for a desk wall, a kitchen nook, a bedside or a bookcase shelf. The apricot and cream suit warm whites, light oak, sage green and natural linen, and give a corner of a room a glow without color overload. Hung low over a console or at eye level in a hall, it makes a friendly, sun-washed accent.

Hand-dyed fabric on stretcher bars, 10 x 10 x 0.75 in (25.4 x 25.4 x 1.9 cm). Unframed.

Panda Landa builds each piece from second-hand fabric that is dyed by hand, then cut and sewn together by instinct and improvisation, letting the composition develop naturally. Seams join the cloths into bands, arches, triangles and spirals, and the dye is left to pool and bloom, so the mottling in each cloth stays part of the surface. The sewn panel is stretched over wooden stretcher bars about three quarters of an inch deep and is unframed.

Panda Landa (b. 1982) is a queer, non-binary visual artist and filmmaker raised in the Nevada desert and now based in Joshua Tree, California. Self-taught, they work through instinct and improvisation, making mixed-media textile pieces from second-hand fabrics that are dyed by hand, stitched and stretched over frames. Sustainability is central to the practice, and every cloth arrives with its own history.

Their ongoing series, including PORTAL, ALTAR, ECLIPSE, VESSEL and RITUAL, touch on queerness, identity, ancestral narrative, healing and transformation, and more recent beaded panels carry short, tender phrases in color. Landa made the 2022 film In the Middle of Everywhere and has offered a workshop on giving new life to clothes at the Joshua Tree Music Festival. See less