toward textiles © 2015 John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI toward textiles Contents 3 Material Fix Alison Ferris 9 Ebony G. Patterson: Dead Treez Karen Patterson 11 Joan Livingstone: Oddment[s] Karen Patterson 13 Ann Hamilton: draw Alison Ferris 14 Sandra Sheehy and Anna Zemánková: Botanical Karen Patterson 16 Carole Frances Lung: Factory To Factory Karen Patterson 17 Checklist of Works Cover: Anne Wilson, Dispersions (no. 24, detail), 2013; linen, cotton, thread, and hair; 25 ¼ x 25 ¼ in. Courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, IL. Photo: Adam Liam Rose. MATERIAL FIX Alison Ferris “I worry that the information age is making us very good at symbolization at the expense of bringing us into contact with that which we do not know and for which we have no categories.”1 —Laura U. Marks In recent years, fiber art has eluded characterization as it has infiltrated traditional art practices and expanded into installation and performance. As fiber-based art has grown more mainstream, however, its material-based, multidisciplinary practice risks being compromised, overlooked, or assimilated by the contemporary art world. Material Fix is a contemplation of fiber’s unique material specificity and the ways a range of artists join process with current theoretical and aesthetic concerns. The exhibition examines the manner in which the artists in Material Fix insist on the materiality of their work, Jen Bervin, The Dickinson Fascicles: The Composite Marks of Fascicle questioning the detached sense of vision associated 28, 2006; cotton and silk on cotton and muslin; 72 x 96 in. Courtesy of with this digital age where appearances are often separate the artist. Photo: Don Tuttle. from real-life existence. The exhibition suggests that, in an age dominated by linear, cerebral, and linguistic analysis, it is more important than ever to reinforce awareness of humanity’s shared physical experience. Rubbing one’s hand over the upholstery of a favorite For example, Louise Bourgeois’s (1911–2010) use of ticking, armchair, noticing a sweater’s softness and warmth when a dense fabric used to make mattresses and pillows, in folding it, recognizing the smell of a loved one when Untitled (2005), suggests beds. By extension, beds evoke hanging up his or her coat—these are moments of notions of birth, sex, dreams, illness, and death, among everyday life that are frequently experienced but rarely other universal experiences. Depending upon one’s remarked upon. They are, as French novelist, essayist, and history, the work can stir happiness, shame, or grief before filmmaker Georges Perec writes, “the banal, the quotidian, one even recognizes the memory or narrative related to it. the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, Art historian Jill Bennett explains, “Although words can the background noise, the habitual,”2 and they are, in part, clearly serve sense memory, vision has a very different composed of sensual and felt qualities. These are relationship to affective experience—especially to described by some as “affect,” feelings that precede experience that cannot be spoken as it is felt. The eye cognition and denote the intensity of aliveness. Affects, can often function as a mute witness by means of which cultural theorist Raymond Williams writes, “...do not have events register as eidetic memory images imprinted to await definition, classification, or rationalization before with sensation.”4 they exert palpable pressures.”3 While language is not frequently used to interpret these events, these are One can argue that all the other artists’ works in Material moments that remind us we are sensual beings and Fix function, to some degree, in the same manner. For contribute to the complex layers of meaning that make instance, in Southern Lights (2014), Elana Herzog (NY) our lives what they are. They constitute a significant explores the remnants of everyday life using blankets. Cut part of the experience of connecting human beings and ripped, the fabrics are integrated into the architecture to one another. of space so that they seem to grow seamlessly out of the corners of a room’s walls. Her work suggests the uncanny Fiber-based works of art can particularly be understood in presence of memories from the past that can be conjured terms of affect in large part because of their immediately simply by a piece of fabric. Jesse Harrod (PA) uses scraps recognizable relationship to ordinary, everyday textiles. of fabric found in thrift stores in Frosted Pink Lipstick 3 Cat Mazza, Stitch for Senate (detail), 2007–9; wool-blend yarn and paper; 12 x 7 x 9 in. Courtesy of the artist. however, is not opposed to the thinking process in the sense of supplanting critical inquiry with a kind of passive bodily experience; far from foreclosing on thought, it agitates, compelling and fueling inquiry rather than simply Amy Honchell, Everything Comes to Nothing, 2015; glissenette, fiber, 5 wood, acrylic, and gold leaf; 23 x 20 x 8 in. Courtesy of the artist. placating the subject.” She continues, “In its capacity to stimulate thought, the encountered sign is—according to Deleuze—superior to the explicit statement, for it is engaging at every level: emotionally, psychologically, sensorially.”6 For the works in Material Fix, the importance of this concept of the encountered sign is that it combines Smeared All Over His Face (2010–11) and Late Bloomers the affective actions of the work of art with a thinking (2013) and integrates the layers of emotional histories process without insisting on the primacy of either. that accompany these found fabrics into the meaning of her work. Amy Honchell does the same in her work such A prime example is Cat Mazza’s (NY) Stitch for Senate as Everything Comes to Nothing (2015), where the layers (2007–9). Mazza and her volunteers knit helmet liners for of fabrics—all gifts to the artist—form the geology of her American combat forces and sent them to senators to childhood home, rural Pennsylvania. Here, the fabric persuade them to support the troops by bringing them embodies the psychological and sensual substance of the home from Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that each people who lived on and worked this land. helmet liner was hand knit for an individual suggests that the viewer pause long enough to imagine who that person Such affective meanings in works of art are thought might be—not an anonymous soldier, but a person, with provoking as well as emotive. As such, these works of loved ones worrying and waiting for them to come home. art can be understood to be what the French philosopher Josh Faught (CA) ruminates extensively over the AIDS Gilles Deleuze describes as the “encountered sign,” which crisis in It Takes a Lifetime to Get Exactly Where You Are differs from a recognized object in that it can be felt or (2012). Mourning is monumentalized in this work, and the sensed. Bennett elaborates on Deleuze’s idea, explaining, act of mourning itself is epitomized by the excessively “The kind of affect the [encountered] sign incites, repetitive action of weaving, crocheting, and knitting. 4 Josh Faught, It Takes a Lifetime to Get Exactly Where You Are, 2012; sequin trim, hemp, cedar blocks, cotton, polyester, wool, cochineal dye, straw hat with lace, toilet paper, paper towels, scrapbooking letters, Jacquard woven reproduction of a panel from the AIDS quilt, silk handkerchief, indigo, political pins, disaster blanket, gourd, gold leaf, plaster cat, cedar blocks, and nail polish; 96 x 240 in. Courtesy of Lisa Cooley Gallery, NY. Photo: Cary Whittier. David Harper’s (WI) intricate, time-consuming embroidery on animal skins explores humankind’s proclivity to find “pleasure in asserting control over what is wild . reminding us of what we no longer have and no longer are.”7 Anne Wilson’s (IL) Dispersions (2013) are fragments of her family’s luxurious damask table linens presented in the different sizes of formal table napkins. The function of the decorative floral fabric is undermined by the holes in the cloth accentuated with countless colorful, miniscule stitches sewed by hand. From a distance the sewn holes might suggest evidence of a gunshot, a burn, or a celestial explosion. Up close, each stitch assertively records a moment in time and represents the notion of “slow time”— an aspect of the international Slow Movement. Wilson is quick to assert, however, that her work is not a reaction in opposition to the speed of newer digital technology but is complimentary to it. Jen Bervin (NY) reproduces, in embroidery, Emily Dickinson’s abstract code of dashes, periods, and cross marks that are found in the writer’s original fascicles, the homemade books of poetry that Dickinson carefully sewed together. Bervin’s series David R. Harper, Encyclopedia of the Familiar (detail), 2015; cowhide, called The Dickinson Fascicles (2004–6) reintroduces polyurethane, synthetic hair, horsehair, fiber, and mixed media. the mysterious and poignant personal code found in Courtesy of the artist. Dickinson’s poetry, largely ignored by scholars because it is inexplicable, as well as the sensual physicality of the manuscripts themselves. The affective actions of a work of art also illustrate that the art object cannot be separated from the viewer: 5 Susie Ganch, Pile: Starbucks on Robinson, April–December 2012, 2013; plastic and mixed media; 120 x 84 x 12 in. Courtesy of Sienna Patti, MA. Photo: David Hunter Hale. physically, emotionally, and psychologically, the process providing an affective closeness. For instance, of experiencing art places the spectator at the center of Polly Apfelbaum’s (NY) Bring Back the Funk (2013) aesthetic discourse. The power of art to elicit an affective is an engulfing cacophony of colorful, stained velvet and visceral response can be described as haptic, a term covering the floor.