MAKING
marks
a fiber and textile exhibition
ARTIST STATEMENT BOOK presented by
Wayne Art Center DECEMBER 2, 2016 - JANUARY 28, 2017
December 2, 2016 - January 28, 2017 Wayne Art Center Executive Director:
Nancy Campbell
Wayne Art Center Director of Special Projects:
Karen Louise Fay
Wayne Art Center Graphic Designer: Abby Ober Catalog Editor/Art Director and Program and Exhibitions Associate: AnnaO’Neill Making Marks Curator: Mi-Kyoung Lee, University of the Arts Cover Art: Yellow Forest 2, Mi-Kyoung Lee
Wayne Art Center Š 2016 Wayne Art Center All images courtesy of the artists All Rights Reserved
Making Marks Artists Curator: Mi-Kyoung Lee
Program Director of Craft and Material Studies University of the Arts
Danielle Bodine, WA Susie Brandt, MD Andrew Dahlgren, PA Carla Fisher, PA Cynthia D. Friedman, pA Qiang Gong, IL/China Jesse Harrod, PA Jeanne Jaffe, PA Mi-Kyoung Lee, PA Kristen Miller, OR Warren Seelig, ME Piper Shepard, MD Heather Ujiie, PA Pasi Valimaa, Sweden Dot Vile, PA
Danielle Bodine Clinton, WA
Red Dot Galaxy 2016 Coiled waxed linen, lapel or hatpins, plastic tubes, beads, vintage pistils, hair brush tines. 50” x 60” x 9” $3,200
Weaving, quilting, needle arts, silk screening, and basketry are areas of fiber I’ve explored over the years. My current work is a culmination of reflections and experiences with techniques and concepts. When I first experimented with fiber, I worked in a two dimensional format. I found that I wanted to manipulate the flat surfaces into three-dimensional forms. The discovery of basketry techniques enabled me to construct forms without constrictions of size or shape. My experimentation with paper began over 18 years ago after discovering a variety of exquisite kozo papers in a shop in Japan. Returning home, I began to use them for printmaking and then to apply the printed papers to the surfaces of my basket forms. Coming from a textile background, I enjoy that paper has a memory and retains the textures from the objects it is cast on. It also has the freedom and flexibility to be painted, dyed, and altered, giving the illusion of weight, of being made of metal or clay. I love to travel internationally and to visit ethnological museums. My work often reflects these experiences with other cultures. As for my philosophy, the process of creating is centering and exciting. It is important to me in my own work and when I teach, to encourage experimentation - new techniques, forms, materials, and content.
Susie Brandt Baltimore, MD
Snow Fence 2016 Hand cut American flag. 120” x 72” $1,400
Making things and making things up happen simultaneously. I reimagine the utilitarian. I think through color and cloth, through terrain and time. I think through acts of gathering, and through systematic incremental building. I sometimes erode. For this exhibition, I wondered if a flag could be upcycled into something practical. Could its use-value be altered to serve in a new way – in a way, perhaps, that better reflects our time? Thus a snow fence is proposed. Susie Brandt was raised at her parents’ ski-mountain in upstate New York. She left to study art and has kept at it ever since. She now lives and works in Baltimore — has exhibited widely, has curated exhibitions, and teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Andrew Dahlgren Philadelphia, PA
Collection 2016 Wool, cotton, polyester, acrylic, bamboo, alpaca, silk. Installation; dimensions vary. $6,500
Andrew Dahlgren’s work explores the social, cultural, and economic impacts of making. His work falls somewhere within the overlapping worlds of design + manufacturing, craft + industry, education + community organizing. Andrew’s studio practice focuses on discovering unexpected results by combining the techniques and technology involved in machine knitting with iterative material explorations. This process has allowed him to generate a broad range of personal work and has lead to collaborations with fashion designers, industrial designers, artists, and architects.
Carla Fisher Philadelphia, PA
Renewal 2016 Robeson Anton rayon embroidery thread, washaway stabilizer, used Tyvek envelopes, watercolor. 38” x 36” x 1” $1,250
I have always been in awe of artists and their ability to share their feelings in such an intimate, expressive way. Throughout my life, color, texture, shape, and most importantly, nature, were magnets. Little did I know that, after the death of my husband, art would be the healing therapy that brought renewed meaning and joy to my life. After all, my life and career had been entrenched in the financial services business for twenty-five years, not art! When one suffers an emotional loss, there is this sense of aloneness, worthlessness, hollowness, and simply feeling useless. At the intersection of those emotions and an overpowering basal need to express those sentiments creatively, Discarded was born. This series of works utilizes thread and thrown away materials to symbolize how even the tired, used, and totally spent can experience new life. Renewal, the cornerstone piece of this series, uses old Tyvek envelopes and thread to bring forth the cleansing wash of water and the comforting smile of a summer’s day sky. As I shape my world through free motion machine embroidery, I seek the viewer’s visceral response of surprise when they realize the sculpture material is simply thread. It is the reminder and the confirmation that one little strand truly can do seemingly impossible things when challenged to do so.
Cynthia D. Friedman Merion, PA
Lonely Traveler 2016 Silk. 38” x 43.5” $2,200
I have always loved the geometry in block pattern quilts and the possible rotation and manipulation of those patterns. I am also very interested in human body shapes and movement and all those elements are part of my current series of “shadowscapes”. I am using images of humans and their shadows in a given landscape. I love working with the silks because they glow and reflect light and the added focus on transparency both literal and in terms of color is my new obsession.
Qiang Gong Chicago, IL / China
Flying Rug 2016 Wood, plastic. 80” x 80” x 10” $1,888
The knowledge of Textile often refers to any material made of interlacing fibers. Fabric is material made through weaving, knitting or bonding. Cloth is synonymous with fabric but often refers to a finished piece of fabric used for a specific purpose. In my “sand textile” work, the performance digging and pouring replace weaving and knitting. These actions involve the entire body, immerses the viewer in a large earthwork. The “sand textile” changes leaving no physical object behind. From learning basic textile techniques, I naturally trained myself mathematically and geometrically. Influenced by tablet weaving and jacquard loom, I am very interested in how thread feeds through a card system and the system determines the form of the resulting patterns. I see the connection between of mathematic concept and physical expression. My work is about abstract mathematical patterns. Given by traditional textile techniques, my “sand textile” allow me to get more inspiration and imagination.
Jesse Harrod City, State
Friendship Bracelet 2014 Found rope, plexiglass. 20” x 42” $4,000
I produce both large and mid-scale installations and sculptures out of what I call “femmy detritus”: brash, colorful, and lowbrow materials – including sequins, fringe, and Sculpey – conventionally associated with hobby crafts and domesticity. Foregrounding questions of gender, queerness, and their intersections, my work tracks the affective and cultural circulation of meaning through which particular materials – and the bodies with which they are associated – become designated as “trash” and “waste.” Across my practice, I show how these discarded materials can be re-purposed on behalf of insurgent imaginations of queer-feminist survival. I transform materials to animate their sexual and sensual qualities, for example, by crafting penile and labial arrangements that perform and interrupt normative gender conventions. Pointing to the convergences but also the divergences between “disposable” objects and “disposable” people, my work additionally registers the vibrancy of materials and signals how, when transformed, they can take on personalities, behaviors, and attitudes irreducible to human feeling or character. I therefore view my sculptural works as inhabitants of dynamic queer communities that offer new ways of being, knowing, and relating. My work employs a maximalist aesthetic to convey the enormity and messiness of feeling in the face of the political structures that confine queer bodies. For this reason, I tend towards a direct form of address. Indeed, I want my installations to scream at you much like the prototypical 1970s feminist screams at you. In so doing, my work builds on and augments histories of queer-feminist militancy in artistic production.
Jeanne Jaffe Pennsylvania
TS Eliot Four Quartets East Coker 2016 Mixed media, paper, cloth, resin, clay. Installation; dimensions vary $7,000
More recently, the focus of my work has shifted from creating sculptures that explore pre-verbal sensations to an interest in the relationships of language, text, and image within a spatial format. To this end, I have been creating installations composed of sculptural forms and related text that explore two areas of literature: poetry and folktales. The installations act as illuminated manuscripts through which one can walk and experience the story in an embodied manner. In these installations linguistic sculptural elements interact with pre-verbal dreamlike or hybrid forms that relate to the text. While walking through the installations one can reconsider each fragment of the text and image and reflect on its possible multiple meanings and readings. The two different signifying systems of language and image Intertwine, echo and augment each other and highlight different aspects of our bodily and mental experience. The recent introduction of interactive sound and motion amplify this experience.
Mi-Kyoung Lee Philadelphia, PA
Yellow Forest 2 2016 Twist ties. 72� x 96� x 12� $6,000
The repetitive process of mark making has been a great strength in my work. I allow my intellect and body to follow the rhythmic processes of repetition, understanding the relationships between tool and material, the material and process, and image and content. The consistent process of art making is ritual ceremony. My entire body and soul purely united. The inspiration behind my images unfolds with the mysterious human life.
Kristen Miller Oregon
Ghost City
Shared Paths
Steam
2016 Reclaimed printed cotton handkerchief, glass beads, nylon thread.
2016 Cotton organdy, glass beads, nylon thread.
2014 Reclaimed printed cotton handkerchief, glass beads, nylon thread.
11” x 11” $3,000
4” x 6.5” each $3,000
5.5” x 5.5” $2,500
My work is influenced by the transient nature of both living organisms and inanimate objects. Often I capture images or remember events as they are in the midst of changing or disappearing. I want to make the invisible visible. I’m interested in the elusive quality of time and numbers. The materials used in my small and large scale works reflect these ideas: minute glass beads, light, transparent fabrics like cotton organdy and worn handkerchiefs, glassine and discarded papers, as well as fine thread and wire. Stitching and beading are ways of drawing and generating forms that create a tangible measurement of time. Kristen Miller was born in Kansas City, Kansas. She received a BFA in Textile Design in 1987 from the University of Kansas and a MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1993. She lives in Portland, Oregon and is represented by PDX Contemporary Art Gallery.
Warren Seelig Rockland, ME
Shadowfield Colored Light x2 2016 Lucite, silver brazed stainless steel. 40” x 35” x 9” $9,000 each half/ $18,000 pair Courtesy of Snyderman-Works Galleries, Philadelphia, PA
The Shadowfield is for me a way of constructing a textile which is more metaphorical and less literal. Although born out of a corporeal sensibility involving a deep, fundamental attraction to materiality and structural process as a means of transforming, these fields are becoming less tangible and more illusive. The ambiguous relationship between material, light, and shadow is causing an energy field, at times a nearly indecipherable matrix of obsessively repeating parts and particles, expanding, swelling, increasing and decreasing. It is a fantasy about the textile, a phenomenon which evokes images of connection and connectedness, of crystalline fields, cellular atmospheres and granular surfaces in three dimensions.
Piper Shepard Baltimore, MD
Radial 2 & 3 2014 Hand cut digitally printed cotton, aluminum armature. 54” x 54” x 12” each $4,000 each
Cloth holds history and memory. It is both fragile and enduring. Objects in our textile historical record serve as a model and guide for me. For more than a decade, I have cut cloth into lace-like filigree patterns, sometimes employing a regimented structure and other times akin to freehand drawing. This process is informed by both the qualities of the cloth—among them, the physical tolerance of the material itself—and the rich domain represented by the intersection of cloth and cloth history. Currently, I have extended my practice to include digital methods. This fresh approach has allowed me to observe how handwork and more current technologies inform each other, and how the intimacy of making can translate using new materials and methods. My goal is to further pursue this avenue, whereby cloth is coaxed toward its most fragile limits to insight the temporal qualities of lightness and ephemerality.
Heather Ujiie Philadelphia, PA
Die Vier Hexen 2014 Digital print on polyester duck. Dimensions 116” x 46” $10,000
Textile artist and designer Heather Ujiie incorporates many techniques--including hand painting, drawing, stitching, and printing with innovative large-format digital printing technology, to create a Utopia, that she describes as “ a celebration of the unconscious.” As an other-worldly environment, the installation reflects her interests in biodiversity and the future of our environs. This is accomplished through the creation of a fantastical landscape of hybrid animals and plant forms influenced by early botanical and anatomical illustrations by artists such as, Piero Fornasetti, Jean Cocteau, and Renaissance and Baroque iconography. This transcendental experience, using digitally created textile panels and upholstered furnishings, is made complete by the accompaniment of audio recordings from nature.
Pasi Valimaa Gothenberg, Sweden
Silrelief 2016 Silk organza. 47.25� x 39.37� $3,000
I am happy to invite you to my world of textile where colors, threads, light and shadows play with the material itself. I am fond of the sensuality of my material that I transform to something that reminds me of nature, weather and wind. Working by hand gives me possibilities to work with small changes in repetition that gives the rhythm to the work. The results are everything from small scale embroideries to hand-dyed, massive stage curtains. Each of them with their own expression that comes from the intimate contact between me and the material. The language of the work is quite silent and meditative, but also vibrating under the surface.
Dot Vile
Philadelphia, PA
Blanket from Mom 2016 Weft cut out cotton blanket. 47” x 24” x 7” $1,800
I work to sort through my relational and theological questions I have stemming from my upbringing. I was raised in a tiny, twin house in a West Philadelphia suburb. My father worked six days a week on the railroad and my mother was a homemaker to ten children. He worked outside the home while she worked inside of it. Their roles were divided yet synchronized. Their interplay as male and female, husband and wife, and mother and father is something I always watched and continue to. This upbringing let me see similarities between a house and a body. Throughout my work, I play with this theme while pointing to opposites: man vs. woman, inside vs. outside, strength vs. weakness, concrete vs. ethereal, tranquility vs. turmoil, and so on. I use my own bodily strength to work with household materials I find while testing and highlighting the gender roles they carry. This piece blanket from mom is an exploration of both its tangible structure and the unseen nostalgia I hold on to. I used the strength, height and width of my body to navigate the blanket and deconstruct the weave. Deconstructing is an attempt to somehow know my materials more intimately. I began by haphazardly, and almost frantically, cutting away at the threads, and finished by dissecting each one with calculated intention. A great aim in my work is to seek out any hint of beauty within desecration.
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