‍December 4, 2025 – January 3, 2026
Public Reception: Friday, December 12, 6–8PM

Chozick Family Art Gallery is pleased to announce Allegory of Continents, a solo exhibition by Filipinx-Canadian artist Sara Jimenez. Marking her first solo presentation with the gallery, this body of work confirms Jimenez’s established reputation in large-scale installation and extends into new realms with ceramic sculpture.

Jimenez has become known for her site-specific works that navigate across geography, culture, and history. Her recent textile based outdoor sculpture, Folding Field, (on view at Wave Hill from June - September, 2025) demonstrated her ability to combine fabric, form, and space into poetic landscapes of memory and migration. In Allegory of Continents, she revisits that terrain, then shifts, and deepens it. The new work draws on geological formations,oceanic currents, constellations once used for navigation, sound waves from familial heartbeats, and ceremonial structures rooted in her ancestral lineages – from the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the ancient UK.

The exhibition is anchored by a major sculpture titled Allegory of Continents (1-10) which is installed down the center of the gallery. The work consists of ten panels of textile, each suspended within an identical steel arch and anchored in concrete casts of the artist’s own hands and feet. The textiles – brilliant hues of Jimenez’s signature pink, semi-transparent, printed and hand-embroidered with geometric patterns – are Jimenez’s cosmograms: two-dimensional fields in which celestial bodies, beliefs systems, precolonial designs, and geographies coexist. These are not maps in the conventional sense, but non-linear spaces whose intention is felt, not navigated.

The form of the biombo is central to Jimenez’s logic throughout the exhibition. A Mexican folding screen used to divide space, the biombo came to Central America from Japan and the Philippines via the Spanish Empire’s Manila Galleon. The word biombo is a hispanicization of the Japanese word byōbu. Jimenez is interested in the double-sided object as a site where space and time expand and contract, as well as the geopolitical and cross-cultural nuances that led to the biombos' existence. 

Jimenez’s biombo is inspired by the Allegories of the Four Continents, a ten panel painting created in the late 17th century by Afro-Mexican artist Juan Correa. Correa’s piece used depictions of people to represent the world’s continents. In her reenvisioning, Jimenez considers both the form of the biombo and Correa himself as manifestations of multi-cultural global exchanges. Although these specific exchanges were dominated by colonialism, there was also a fugitive, unexpected intermingling took place which led to acculturation in beliefs, ethnicities, and objects.

Along the gallery walls, Jimenez presents new ceramic works. Some pieces reference bodies that resemble landscapes; others take the form of archways or doorways, embedding body parts and intricate ornamentation in suggestions of architecture. For Jimenez, the arch or doorway is at once boundary and threshold, space and passage, marking liminal moments of transformation.

Jimenez’s practice illuminates the intersection of bodies and spaces, of materials and migrations, of ancestral pasts and speculative futures. From the fluidity of textile to the permanence of fired clay Jimenez maintains the poetic, immersive sensibility of her previous installations.