UNRAVELING THE MARVELOUS |
by April Kingsley |
The most obviously amazing and labor intensive works in the exhibition are the
embroideries by Mary Bero, D.R. Wagner, Linda Behar and Scott Rothstein. Some so fine you
need a magnifying glass to see them properly. Rothstein has spent 15 years studying the
subtleties of line created by twisting threads; the result of which are myriad permutations in
three-color abstractions. Ikat weaving, indigo dying, and tapestry weaving in the hands of Jun
Yomita, Glen Kaufman, Sara Lindsay, Rebecca Medel, and Laura Foster Nicholson can be
equally difficult to produce. The resultant works are so intricate that one is at a loss to figure
out how they were made. Computers can help the weaver, particularly with ikat, where the
dyeing is done in a predetermined pattern before being woven. (Just think of how difficult it
would be to weave a vertical line down the center without a computer.) Kaufman silkscreens
photographic imagery and pastes silver leaf onto his fine silk threads, in addition to dying
them, prior to weaving his extraordinarily finely woven images (over a hundred silk threads
to a warp inch). His subjects are often Japanese buildings viewed through the grid of a
multipaned window. His work comments on how constantly a grid or window intervenes
between us and our view wherever we are.
Computers make a work like Bhakti Ziek's History of Fabrics: Notebook Pages-Blue
Borders, 1996, possible. A computerized jacquard loom and image scanner transformed
notebook pages from a graduate textile history course into a six foot high, woven weft-back,
double sided cotton meditation on fiber's historical function as recorder and timekeeper. If it
had been done completely by hand, given the small size of the letters, it would have taken a
lifetime or more. (Ziek weaves on a traditional 16 harness loom for pleasure, when she's away
from the computer).
Others seduced by the swiftness of using the new technologies or a prewoven material also
find ways to labor intensify and retain the handmade presence. Kiyomi Iwata, for instance,
uses wire mesh screening readily available in a hardware store, but then she spends many
hours embroidering, gold-leafing, painting, and otherwise embellishing the objects she makes
with it. When Lia Cook has finished all of the complex processing that goes into transforming
a photographic image of drapery into a exegesis on fabric, its history and meaning, its
sensuous nature, and its use in art, the image has literally been compressed into the fabric's
weave, and you marvel at how it got there. Installing Cook's work next to Rebecca Medel's
light and shimmering screens of barely perceptible fiber brings out the sensuality of both, and
of fiber's tactility in general.
Joyce Scott's sculptures made of beads, like Jane Sauer's of knots and Karyl Sisson's of
measuring tapes, are in the tour de force category of nonwoven fiberwork along
with and Mazakazu Kobayashi's cubic constructions. Kobayashi's incredible linear density is
the result of twenty years of studying the tensions of string — ten years stretching string in
straight lines, ten more loosening it to a parabola.
But the acme of the marvelous in this wonderful exhibition may lie in the mysteries of the
fabrication of Jason Pollen's blue Terra Ephemera Series, 1991, and John McQueen's
extraordinary Ordinary Orange, 1990. Pollen's work is fused and dyed silk which
looks like pebbles and grass, heaven knows how. It seems easy to see how McQueen's vessel
was made: the orange peels are tacked to the outside of a gourd with tiny red pegs. But wait a
minute. As the peel dried, why didn't it pull out those pegs, and pull away from the gourd and
neighboring pieces of peel. The pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, which doesn't seem
possible. But then, how did Jo Barker "paint" like an Abstract Expressionist in a weaving or
Sara Brennan get that loosely painted, Rothko-like separation between the two planes of her
undated, deceptively simple, wool tapestry, Broken Grey Line I?
These craftspeople make painting with oil or welding steel look like such uncomplicated,
easy ways of making art.
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