ICOSA, Austin, TX
August 14th – September 12th, 2026
Gestures of Care examines motherhood not as a fixed identity but as an evolving set of actions, relationships, and responsibilities. Bringing together photography, video, collage, textiles, and sculpture, the exhibition asks what constitutes motherhood and whether it can be understood beyond biological or societal definitions.
Working from distinct yet intersecting perspectives, Ana Treviño and Chantal Lesley explore these themes through lived experience and aspiration. One is grounded in the daily realities of raising a child; the other is rooted in the practices of care, longing, and possibility that surround maternal impulses, whether realized or not. Together, their work suggests that motherhood is an active, ongoing practice.
Treviño draws from her experience as a mother, interrogating the historical, cultural, and media narratives that have shaped maternal identity while revealing its complexities, contradictions, and emotional terrain. Seeking other maternal perspectives is at the heart of Treviño’s investigation of motherhood. Rather than focusing solely on those who have already birthed their children, Treviño puts the lens on expecting mothers. Some are having their second child, others are having their first. Treviño also reflects deeply on the concept of holding. She wants mothers, who often do the holding, to feel held. Working with her son’s clothing, she repurposes textile to create a macramé hammock, reflecting on the future when someday her child will be the one holding her. The body is also at the center of Treviño’s work. Having extensively researched Mesoamerican fertility figures, she draws from her own ancestral connection to Olmec and Aztec civilizations. Using 3D scanning technology, Treviño scanned her own body and made contemporary fertility figures. Drawing connections to past examples of what fertility looked like, she considers how her own body serves as an image of fertility, beauty, and social role.
Lesley investigates the maternal through lived acts of care, asking how nurturing, attachment, and responsibility shape identity even when motherhood remains imagined, uncertain, or out of reach. Drawing on experiences of tending to siblings, an ailing parent, her pet, and herself, her work considers how caregiving exists beyond parenthood, emerging through everyday gestures of attention, protection, and presence. Through photography, collage, and textiles, she examines how acts of nurture shape identity through memory, longing, and ritual. As part of her practice, Lesley collaborated with children ages four to nine, inviting them to photograph whatever drew their attention and to draw flowers of their choosing. Their photographs become elements within her collages, while their drawings are translated into hand-sewn fabric compositions, foregrounding children's perspectives and embracing collaboration, trust, and shared authorship as gestures of care.
Across the exhibition, care emerges as the thread that binds these perspectives together, appearing as ritual, labor, protection, repair, grief, tenderness, and endurance. Rather than offering a singular definition of motherhood, Gestures of Care invites viewers to consider care as an intimate practice and cultural force, one expressed through acts of attention, reciprocity, and responsibility toward children, families, communities, and ourselves.
THANK YOU TO MY COLLABORATORS:
Jayzar P, Yifei J, Viggo, Phoenix, Jonangeliz D, Halo H, Mateo L, Camilo C, Lillian M, Mia A, Lucia F
Events
Artist Talk, Moderated by Jai Fields
Saturday, September 5, 2026
2:00PM - 3:00 PM
ICOSA Collective Gallery
916 Springdale Rd, Bldg 2, #102, Austin, TX 78702
Press
The Austin Chronicle: Arts Review - “Gestures of Care” at ICOSA Collective
