Available Works
Available June 11, 2026 at Tappan Collective
Meadowland
In Meadowland, Chanee Vijay turns her attention to the mutable terrain of the Sonoma County coast, translating its shifting hues and layered histories into thirteen abstract textile collages. She constructs surfaces that echo coastal meadows shaped as much by centuries of human use as by seasonal light. Her compositions hold a quiet tension between past and present: ranch lands and sheep‑grazed fields, Indigenous histories, and the remnants of the nineteenth‑century mill era. Working in abstraction, Vijay allows the hemp ground and its layered stitchwork to read as visual sediment - accumulated time made tactile.
Brittle Wood 60x36"
Some Earthly Thing 60x36"
Ceremony 48x48"
Early Summer 48x36"
Rescue 25x21"
Unfolding 48x48"
Suddenly Flowers 36x24"
Gathered To Listen 25x21"
Impatient For Sunrise 24x36"
Ready Sweetness 24x26"
Suntanned 36x60"
Usual Sun 36x48"
Wildness 25x21"
Available February 16, 2026 at Tappan Collective
Repelling
In Repelling, textile artist Chanee Vijay challenges her natural inclination toward muted, analogous palettes by immersing herself in the energetic duality of complementary colors. In this 15-piece hemp textile collage series, Chanee hand-dyes and constructs works that investigate the emotional and visual tension between chromatic opposites. Complementary colors are biologically and psychologically intense when placed side by side. For Chanee, who gravitates toward balance, softness, and quiet chroma, this vibration mirrors an inner discomfort. These works emerge from that unease.
Across the series, she experiments with what happens when these opposites are confronted, softened, layered, or allowed to bleed into one another. Hard contrasts dissolve into foggy borders. Saturated hues become atmospheric through hemp’s porous fiber. Colors that once repelled begin to converse. Each textile collage becomes a physical record of negotiating opposites. In some pieces, complements blend into earthy browns, which is the irony at the heart of color theory. From the most extreme difference emerges the most stable neutral.
“I have generally kept my palettes soft and tonal. Anything too intense, with too much saturation, feels like conflict to my nervous system. But I realized that by confronting this discomfort, I could use the overstimulation as an act of growth." Chanee Vijay
Available October 12, 2025 at Tappan Collective
Dirty Flowers
Dirty Flowers is a gesture of release. The series invites viewers to examine the origins of their shame and consider what might be shed. Healing, as Vijay proposes, begins with visibility, with kindness, and with the courage to redefine inherited narratives. Echoing Kai-Lilly Karpman’s poem Where to Bury It, the works whisper: “Let shame slip, lost, / between our kinder fingers.” Like blooms rising from storm-soaked soil, these collages honor the messy, the bruised, and the soft, reminding us that “without the dark, there’d be no moon.” Dirty Flowers is an offering of soul-worn land, a place to sit beside one another and be seen without fear.
Where to Bury It
Late Summer bears bright light,
Glaring at my every bruise and bite,
Places where I was too sweet or too soft,
Like a meadow stripped of grass,
Where crass picnickers loved it off.
But I don’t mind my messy side,
For without storms, there’d be no blooms.
Without the dark, there’d be no moon,
And bees would be just flies
Without their stingers.
Understand something rotten
May always linger,
But who you really are
Is the only right thing to be.
So, come, sit next to me.
Bear my soul’s worn land,
Like handfuls of loose sand,
Let shame slip, lost,
between our kinder fingers.
Available July 10, 2025 at Tappan Collective
Light That Does Not Promise
"For me the summer fog along the Sonoma County coast is a reminder that beauty resides in transience and imperfection, and that sometimes the light that does not promise clarity can provoke an emotional response. Observing how the fog dissolves distant landscapes into softened abstractions while sharpening the richness of foreground hues, I was inspired to translate these fleeting moments into my work through the process of dying, layering and sculpting the hemp fabric."
Available March 26, 2025 at Tappan Collective
The Calm of Darkness
In her series, "The Calm of Darkness," Chanee Vijay explores the intersection of sensory perception and nocturnal ambience. Set against Northern California's coastal redwoods and meadows, this 10-piece hemp textile collage collection examines how darkness shapes visual and psychological experiences.
"Living in this remote place without light pollution introduced me to a kind of darkness I had never experienced. I challenged myself to stand within the darkness to unveil how the night, rather than inducing fear and uncertainty, could be seen and revered. This intentional exercise, though uncomfortable, eventually removed the barriers of my learned anxieties, just as the shadows brought on by nightfall swallow the colors of the landscape."
By dyeing the hemp fabric in phases, first in vibrant hues and then layering on blacks and browns, Chanee captures the tonal and textural shifts of the landscape as perceived through the absence of light. This method adds depth and complexity to each piece, and results in muted, gradient hued collage works.
The Plains Series
Chanee Vijay’s new collage series “The Plains” explores and highlights hemp fiber's response to the elements. Using a combination of natural, bleached, and dyed European hemp to echo and amplify the subtle gradients found within the natural fibers, Chanee’s choices for the pieces are rooted in her upbringing in eastern Kansas. The neutral hues, a palette preference inherited from her mother and reminiscent of the quiet, open landscape of Kansas plains, serve as a through line across each collage. Cultivated through old-world retting methods, the hemp’s color remains at the mercy of the elements, resulting in a tapestry of hues that narrate the story of each growing season. Sunny and dry weather results in brighter hemp fiber, just as rain leads to darker hues. Within the work, flecks of raw fibers, slubs, and the diversity within the weave from the retting process are not imperfections, but celebrations of hemp’s inherent textural qualities. Just as the elements have left their mark on the hemp, they have influenced Chanee’s work, instilling a fondness for self-restraint and beauty of subdued tones. This series is a chronicle of hemp fiber's heritage, a dialogue with the elements, and a reflection of the self.
Available April 1, 2024 at Tappan Collective.
FEBRUARY 2024
The Excitement Of Decay Series
In her new series, The Excitement Of Decay, Chanee Vijay wanders through the often overlooked hues and textures of dead flora found in the meadows and forests of the northern Sonoma Coast in autumn. Chanee painted the pieces of hemp to mimic the deep colors of decaying duff on the forest floor, the subtle golden shifts of dried grasses and ferns lying fallow in the meadows, and the rich emerald shades of new growth pushing through the after the winter rains. Through this twelve-piece series, Chanee shares her reverence for this process of decay, of rest and latency, that precedes the lush lively blooms of early spring.
Available February 27th at Tappan Collective.
NOVEMBER 2023
The Ancient Repetitions Series
In her first series for Tappan, Chanee Vijay shares her regard for the millennia-old landscape on her California property in textile collages that exude awe and a hard-won sense of joy.
Artist Statement
I created this series while living alone for two months with my dogs in the coastal redwoods at The Sea Ranch. The combination of a new isolated location, the solitude, and the astonishingly beautiful landscape allowed me to explore and revel in the unfamiliar. I’ve learned so much about redwood trees, but began to focus my curiosity on how the 1000-year old redwood stumps age and change from their original grand form. The stumps are slowly decaying as their offspring tower around them. They are taking on new forms and purpose — not unlike an aging woman. They’re still giving — topped with huckleberry shrubs, covered in moss, and shedding their thick bark now blackened with protective tannins. This is where I found the shapes for my pieces — the exposed flesh, the grain under the bark, and the contours of erosion. Because huckleberry season is in August and September, I was able to make a huckleberry dye for my natural hemp. The results ranged from soft rose hues to violet and deep indigo. Many of the pieces in the series have a small piece of huckleberry dyed hemp. To me this represents a gift from an ancient ancestor — the mother tree showing us how to embrace change, and forcing me to confront my own fear of aging.
