If there’s one sense of solidarity that ages well across the world, it’s the way humor brings communities together. In digital culture, memes are a constant across all platform feeds and within a segmented part of the Internet, from Instagram to the heyday of Tumblr and 4chan. Getting sucked into a screen and down a doomscroll of laughing while crying is what makes Kayla Mattes’s woven tapestries the crafted bulletin boards of the current times. Memes typically experienced online can be touched, delicate in their pixelation that is now made of hand-dyed wool. Looms are just as technical as they are magical, the whimsy of feeding a linear string into a readable image. For Mattes, the medium is just as physical as it is mental. Top to bottom, side to side. The popularity of taking shortcuts with technology is countered by this deeply classical artistry, which requires Mattes to labor on a singular tapestry over the course of weeks and months.

Computing’s roots in weaving come full circle, as Mattes wields the earliest form of binary in her textiles. Mirroring the programming instructions that fed the oldest computers, the artist slows down in this era of short-form media consumption. The algorithm leaves the app, wrapped in tangles, as iconic symbols in the form of Pepe the Frog and flame emojis poke fun at the political state. Floating text bubbles and app notifications dictate affirmations of praise and satire. Adjacent to the tapestries are hand-sketched graphite screenshots hung in front of the artist’s desk. A time stamp records the impermanence of a click and the fleetingness of a save. In this, Mattes makes the seemingly solitary experience of being online all the more universal in how relatable these cartoon characters are in reacting to the world’s harsh realities and buoyant joys.