“Deborah Lynn Irmas's practice begins with the intimate intelligence of textiles: repetition, structure, and the feminized histories embedded in their materiality. Raised bi-culturally among the fabrics, yarns, sewing, and crochet of her mother's practice, Irmas developed a visual language in which painting and fiber continually cross into one another. In Ode to the Moon, Irmas's "The Way In" transforms the gallery entrance into a threshold. Suspended above the stairs, the work suggests a boundary between realms. Yet a boundary does not only divide. It can also mark a point of passage, where the visible meets the invisible and the familiar begins to feel strange. Thread carries a long mythic resonance. It can bind, connect, protect, guide, or mark a passage between worlds. In Chinese folklore, the invisible thread of fate joins those destined to encounter one another across distance, circumstance, and time. Through this curatorial lens, "The Way In" becomes an imagined net connecting bodies, histories, and unseen realms that still exert their pull. The work also recalls the ancient tale "The Peach Blossom Spring", in which a fisherman accidentally discovers an idyllic world beyond a narrow passage. After leaving, he attempts to return, but the way can no longer be found. Perhaps utopia can be encountered, but never possessed. Perhaps it appears only when we are not searching for it. It also reflects the spirit of "a poco art": a space one might stumble upon, where art, intimacy, and community gather outside the rhythms of this world, not a neutral container, a threshold, threaded by a connection we cannot see, and the worlds we may enter while it lasts.. Ann Shi, Curator, a.poco.art 2026
"In “UNBROKEN (Kaleidoscope)” Deborah Lynn Irmas reinvents traditional mark-making techniques through the novel use of materials - scotch tape. acrylic paint and ink on plexiglass. Functioning like transparent stencils, the outlines of overlapping bits of tape create seemingly random abstract patterns on sixteen monochromatic yet distinctly hued squares forming a larger square grid. Movement and light casting shadows on the wall through the patterned plexiglass animate the orderly geometry of the grid, in which the constituent elements of a kaleidoscope are deconstructed and reassembled. “ Susan L. Power , Art Historian 2018