Fiberart International 4 -- knitting and crochet

There were several intriguing knitted and crocheted pieces at Fiberart International, which was on display all summer in Pittsburgh.

Adrienne Sloane, Marking Time (details below)

This piece is knitted over wire, which is bent to make the script.  I liked the strong graphic quality of the "lines".  (Wished they had put the gallery tag somewhere other than smack in the middle of the pencil-drawn hash marks on the wall!)

Nicole Benner, Comfort/Confine II

Crocheted with metallic yarn and displayed over a mannequin, although in the past it has been worn by a person as performance art.  Can't you just imagine what it would be like to wear a garment like this?  Would you feel slinky and flashy as all get-out, or imprisoned, or both?

Marianne Moore, Financial Ruin (detail below)

A real knockout, knitted out of shredded US currency.  I had to wonder -- did she first have to glue a bazillion six-inch shreds into long yarns?  Sounds like a labor of love.

Rachel Hefferan, Woven/Crochet Transition (details below)

Here's a piece that starts off as weaving and ends up as crochet.  A clever idea, but since the transition between the two techniques seems to be the subject of the work -- see the title -- I wished that she had started crocheting on some of those long warp threads to more seamlessly join the two parts instead of just draping them on top.

Carol Milne, You Can Leave Your Hat On, Doll

And this one gets the originality award: "lead crystal knitted glass hat on mold-blown glass head."  I wish I knew more about glass to understand how this got made -- probably not with asbestos gloves holding knitting needles in the furnace.

Fiberart International 3 -- more holes

Seen at Fiberart International, which has unfortunately just closed in Pittsburgh.

Marie Fornaro, It is Bread We Fight for, but We Fight for Roses, Too (details below)

It's sort of a quilt, since it contains batting and is layered in some places, but it's more deconstructed than not.  Apparently after the large hanging was sewed together, the artist went at it madly with a scissors, slashing and snipping lots of holes and letting the cut-off bits pool attractively on the floor.

I liked the use of old garments, towels and sheets; the touches of red that suggest both roses (as in the title) and blood; the nod to traditional quilt patterns; and the audacity of the crude construction and of course, the slashing,

Susan Avishai, No Place to Hide a Dark Heart (detail below)

It's four layers of an old shirt, hand-cut with scissors into a lacy pattern and suspended about an inch apart, close enough to the wall that the lace casts intricate shadows.  I like the way the untouched pocket and collar stand out from the filigree of the cut shirt.

Leigh Suggs, Untitled (Mondrian's City) (detail below)

This is a construction of Mylar on Tyvek, and I'm not sure how it qualifies as fiber art except that it vaguely resembles weaving.  What's special about it is the red shadow on the wall, cast that way because the back surface is red.  Clever and intriguing.

Six very different takes on holes, transparency and visual weight; I liked the contrasts.

Fiberart International 2 -- lots of holes

Putting holes in previously unbroken materials turned out to be a theme at this year's Fiberart International show, which has been on display in Pittsburgh this summer but just closed two days ago.

My favorite in this category is this pixelated photo treatment made of holes burned into buckram.  There are actually three layers of buckram, hanging about an inch apart, and I think the photo is slightly different on each layer. (It may even be two different people, morphing from one to the other.)

Xia Gao, Passing (details below)

Having worked briefly with burning fabric several years ago, I can appreciate the immense control it takes to burn a regular grid of holes without setting the whole thing on fire, and beyond that, to get exactly enough charred fabric around the edge of each hole to produce value gradations to make the image appear.  An altogether beautiful piece!

Each of the two venues had its own big, black, hulking suspended sculpture --apparently the jurors really wanted to have something big, black, hulking and suspended, but couldn't make up their minds which one to choose.

Jozef Bajus, Toccata and Fugue (detail below)

This one is made out of shiny black leather, cut into smooth-edged cascades of loops and shapes and hung against the wall.

Zlatko Cvetkovic, Wave (detail below)

The second one is made of video and audio tapes, removed from their cassettes and looped into an airy curtain in mid-room.  (Apologies for the out-of-focus photos on both these pieces -- cellphone cameras are pretty capable but apparently don't do well with shiny black stuff.)

But wait, there's more!  More holes in the next post...

Fiberart International 1 -- quilts

Last week I was in Pittsburgh for a family reunion and got to spend two delightful days at museums.  My first stops were the two venues of Fiberart International, the fine exhibition held every three years.  I've seen several past shows and was sometimes disappointed to find few pieces in the traditional quilt format, but this year had several.

Two of the best happened to be made by friends of mine, so I may be prejudiced, but I liked them!  Both were big, bright, intricately machine-pieced and quilted, beautifully composed, making strong statements.

Maria Shell, Mosh Pit @ the Goldern

Judy Kirpich, Anxiety No. 11

Gregory Climer, Men Kissing (detail below)

I liked the way this quilt combined the low-resolution pixelated photo with the hard edges of pieced prints.  I really liked the different grids, with piecing and quilting set at varying angles.

And finally, this calm and simple quilt that reminded me a bit of my own work, with very skinny pieced-in black lines and dense, shiny quilting in many different colors.

Carolina Oneto Tapia, Igualdad (detail below)

And here's one quilt that wanted in the worst way to make a big impact, and almost did, but not quite.

Luke Haynes, [Sewlebrity] Obama 

The gimmick here is the anamorphic projection, portraying a distorted image that reads right if you stand obliquely to the quilt.  But if you don't get it exactly right, it leaves the viewer frustrated.

When you look at the quilt straight on, the left shoulder is much fatter than it should be, but when you look at it from the side, the right shoulder is fatter than it should be.  I couldn't find a sweet spot in between (nor did I think it looked like Obama from any angle).

So much for the quilts -- I'll have a lot more pieces to show you in subsequent posts.


 

Fiberart International 5 -- paper

At Fiberart International I liked several works made of paper, in addition to the piece by Eszter Bornemisza I wrote about last week.  The approaches are widely different, but they're all pretty much white.

Anna Goebel, Greetings from the Forest (detail below)

An installation of sheets of handmade paper, incorporating greenish brown moss that remarkably retains its shape and color amid the white support.

Julie Abijanac, Disease Mapping (detail below)

The artist sewed folded strips of paper into a complex construction that sprawls over the wall resembling a growing organism (the work references her struggle with cancer and apparently the raw material is paperwork accumulated along the way).

Julie Sirek, Dissolving Dream



















The delicate dress is sewed from felted Korean mulberry paper.

Sandy Shelenberger, Textures 1 and 3 (detail of Textures 3 below)

She started by photocopying the back side of a quilted block (I guess, although it's the messiest quilt back I've seen in ages), made many copies, mounted them on boards and covered them with encaustic.  The incised red square in the detail shot, along with other red bits here and there, was added as the wax went on.

Fiberart International 4 -- hand-stitching

I already showed you my favorite piece of hand-stitching from Fiberart International, an embroidery by Stephen Sidelinger.  Here are some more hand-stitched pieces that I liked.

 Mary Mazziotti, It's Just Not Safe (detail below)

Mazziotti found the images in an old pamphlet "obviously intended to terrify children into observing safety rules."  The captions include "Screeching brakes ... but too late ... Tommy is killed!" and "Only a miracle saved Mary's life and she will be seriously crippled!"  The pictures are executed in the familiar stem-stitch embroidery that I learned from my grandmothers, sewing over iron-on transfers.

Tod Hensley, Untitled  (detail below)

This is one of a matched pair of small embroideries, about six inches across, densely composed and stitched with a variety of images.

Roslyn Ritter, Love Letters (detail below)


















Ritter embroidered the text from her father's letters onto her mother's 1936 wedding dress -- pure simplicity and pure love.

Fiberart International 3 -- machine stitching

More work that I liked at Fiberart International, where dense machine stitching was quite the thing. First, three that were stitched onto a fabric base.   Interesting that the first one lies perfectly flat, the second is deliberately distorted by the stitching into 3-D, but the third seems as though it ripples and bulges more by accident than by design.

Ann Graham, City Square (detail below)

Susan Hotchkis, Once (detail below)

Gwen Lowery, Lightning (detail below)

Next, two stitched onto a disappearing solvy base, but looking like they are stitched onto air.

Kimber Olson, Community Center  


















Apologies that my point-and-shoot camera couldn't focus on this image.  The detail show below gives you a much better idea of the wispy texture.

Rachelle Gardner, Unable to Divide (detail below)