San Francisco gallery offers meditative escape through woven textile landscapes
My advice: don't overthink it and drink up the art.
'Margo Wolowiec: Midnight Sun,' the Detroit artist's third solo show at Jessica Silverman, fills the San Francisco gallery with 12 woven circular textile landscapes. Several horizontal strips of juxtaposed images of landscapes, flowers and insects make up each composition. The effect is similar to a photomontage, though the technique is more tactile.
To create these image-based textiles, Wolowiec begins by printing a digital photograph onto loose threads combed out horizontally. Using a sublimation dye process, the ink bonds to the fibers and stains the polyester threads. Wolowiec then rotates the threads so the printed side is visible and weaves them by hand on a loom. During weaving, Wolowiec can manipulate the image to distort it for an effect that renders the images slightly hazy, like glimpses of memories you can't quite piece together.
'I wanted this show to be so very meditative,' Wolowiec told the Chronicle, explaining she chose imagery of parts of the natural world 'that need conservation or are vulnerable or changing due to climate change or human intervention.'
Though a few people at the gallery use the word 'portals' to describe Wolowiec's works, it's really the surface that captures your attention. Woven and textured, the textiles suggest running your hands over them. The vertical undyed warp threads are visibly white, standing out in contrast with the printed digital image. There are also Japanese silver-leafed threads and crinkly mylar emergency blankets, sourced from disaster preparedness kits, that catch the light in a way that creates an unphotographable shimmer. Her works aren't openings to an alternate planet; they're invitations to stay present here.
As a metaphor for a world Wolowiec sees as interconnected, her medium of weaving is unparalleled.
Wolowiec, born in Detroit in 1985, earned a BFA in 2007 from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. In 2013, she earned an MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, through which she met gallery owner Jessica Silverman, also an alumna of the school.
Silverman sees the work as originating in the artist's interest in environment, changing landscape and the 'degradation of and catastrophic kind of pollution in certain areas of the world.' She emphasized, however, that 'this show is not starting from a negative place.'
'It's more about ecological renewal,' Silverman explained, noting the use of silver and indigo, antimicrobial materials, refer to healing.
The phrase 'Midnight Sun' comes from the arctic phenomenon also known as polar day, when the sun neither sets nor rises but appears to move across the sky horizontally. In the show's title piece, the natural event is visualized by six suns that dot the middle of three landscape strips. The top portion features a larger incandescent sun setting, while below is a snowy mountainscape.
This is Wolowiec's first show entirely of round works. Because looms typically produce rectangular weavings, her larger 80-inch pieces feature a vertical seam — a result of her loom's width which limits how wide each section can be woven.
Kathryn Wade, senior director at Jessica Silverman, sees the circular format as symbolic of natural cycles: the earth, the moon, the sun, seeds. The show's description, written by Sarah Thornton (a writer married to Silverman), links the circles to the Italian Renaissance tondo, a round format not traditionally used for landscapes. But Wolowiec offers a more personal meaning; she sees the circle related to birth and 'a lack of a beginning and an end.'
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USA Today
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Los Angeles Times
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Hololive, a division of Cover Corp., is one of the largest VTuber talent agencies in the world, with almost 90 active performers across its various divisions. The company's U.S. office is based in L.A., and its partnership with the Dodgers is to recognize, in part, that the team has a large Japanese fanbase, thanks to megastar Shohei Ohtani. Cover CEO Motoaki Tanigo, however, has a broader goal, and that's to further bring VTubers to the masses. 'There are two reasons,' Tanigo says, via a translator, for why Cover has targeted L.A. as one of its key markets. The first, he notes, is due to the fact that a large part of the company's fanbase resides in the L.A. region. The second, he stresses, relates to his business goals, especially the video game firms Cover hopes to partner with. 'Doing events in the Los Angeles area is not only important for our user engagement, but it's a great opportunity to show to our business clients that we have a strong following.' VTubers have averaged 50 billion YouTube views annually over the past three years, according to a recent YouTube Culture & Trends report. A YouTube sample of 300 virtual creators found that they drove 15 billion views across the site, with 1 billion coming from the U.S. alone. Almost all of these VTubers are steeped deeply in anime lore, culture and tone. And while there are popular male VTubers, a number of the most famous are female-facing. Cover's roster, for instance, is more than three-quarters female. 'It's very exciting,' says Susan Napier, author of 'Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art' and professor at Tufts University who specializes in Japanese culture. 'It allows for an enormous amount of creativity, and a real sense of ownership over your creation, and a way of playing and melding with your creation. People have been fans and identifying with favorite stories, anime and manga for years. This is, in a way, a very old phenomena. It's people wanting to participate in a fantasy world that they love.' Mariya notes she decided to become a VTuber during the worst days of the global pandemic of 2020. 'Everyone was in front of their computers and had a sense of loneliness,' she says. 'And VTubers [had] that sense of, 'I'm not alone. I'm not trapped. There's a whole world out there for me.' Being a big fan of that, I wanted to try that myself. I did not expect to be able to make this into a career, but somehow people liked me, and I thought I could keep going with this.' And how, of course, did she land on her character, a vampire with a bat clip in her hair and an open-chested cocktail server-style outfit? 'That one is tricky because technically I was born a vampire,' Mariya says. 'We're not scary. We ask permission before entering doors, which is better than a lot of people. We do bite. That's the only downside.' Right. The Japan-led VTtuber trend predates the pandemic. The first proper virtual artist to gain fame is widely credited as Kizuna AI in 2016, but VTubers have grown alongside other similar developments. See, for instance, virtual concert artist Hatsune Miku, who performed at Coachella in 2024. VTubers are also closely aligned with video games, often streaming them for their fans. The game medium, of course, has long been associated with virtual avatars, be it Nintendo Mii figures, the personas of 'Second Life' or today's platforms of 'Fortnite,' 'Roblox' and 'Minecraft.' And this summer, in one of the biggest releases of 2025, VTuber Usada Pekora has a role in the PlayStation 5 game 'Death Stranding 2,' with famed director and auteur Hideo Kojima admitting he is a fan. For creator, voice-over actor and Anime Expo attendee AmaLee, the rare VTuber who, while using a stage name, does show her face, anime's fantastical yet mature storylines reached her as a young teen when she was exploring her creativity. 'It's bridging a gap,' she says of VTubing. 'Ever since I was a teenager I loved anime. It's music, beautiful animation and acting all in one. VTubing brings it into the real world. You can do so much with your VTuber lore story. You're kind of creating your own anime.' The most appealing VTubers bring a level of real-life authenticity into their work. 'If you go back and watch my very first streams, I'm very cemented in this cleanly elegant actor [persona],' AmaLee says. 'My voice is different. I dropped it to be cooler. I realized quickly how hard that was to keep, and I didn't like not being authentically me. I'm a little clumsy, a little blond and I have major tech issues.' Mariya describes herself as introvert, saying she wouldn't be streaming — or likely even performing — if it weren't for VTubing. 'With VTubing, there's a sense of anonymity that I think is really good for the audience as well,' Mariya says. 'Some people don't want to see a physical person in front of a screen. They want to see anime girls. I think people latch onto the idea that it's something that is different and bigger than me and bigger than them. It's a new world.' Author and professor Napier says it's a modern, digitized Renaissance faire, if you will, reflecting basic human desires to dress up and play. As for why it just so happens to be so connected to anime, Napier theorizes the medium fosters the idea of fantasy creation. 'Fantasy and science fiction are very popular culture artistic venues to play and to cosplay,' Napier says. 'Anime is really good at presenting you with these — it's brilliantly expansive. Whatever you're into, you'll find it in anime. So if you're looking to VTube, there's all this anime material sitting in front of you. You can pick and choose and start playing.' The dream for the Cover corporation, says Tanigo, is to expand VTubers beyond the world of streaming sites such as YouTube and Twitch — hence, the Dodgers collaboration. In August, Hololive will stage another U.S. concert, this time at Radio City Musical Hall in New York. Music, says Tanigo, is a gateway. 'I believe that's a way of reaching new people,' he says. 'It's an interesting thing to go see. There are also people who may not be interested in VTubing or anime at all, but they can listen to the song that's released and enjoy it as a piece of music on its own.' For the performers, with VTubing comes a sense of safety — and even comfort — that isn't always present in more traditional streaming. 'I did a lot of on-camera streaming in the beginning of my streaming career, but I hated having to get ready, do my makeup, wear something nice,' AmaLee says. 'Even after an hour of getting ready to do a stream, someone was still [commenting], 'You look tired today.' I hated that. There would be days I would cancel streams because I didn't want to get ready. Now I have my VTuber model and can be a little gremlin in my pajamas and no one has to know because Monarch is always perfect.' An anime character, after all, is always ready to go.
