New York Rewoven
Luchia Meihua Lee
Hans Hofmann remarked in
On the Aims of Art that “
every medium of expression has its own laws;
founded on these laws it can be made to resonate and vibrate when stimulated by
the impulses coming directly from the natural world.”
New York artists selected for
Rewoven naturally
display extreme creativity in intuiting and formulating laws to redefine and
reshape “fiber art” ideas, practice, and content. In pursuit of a radical
agenda, compelling voices reexamine innovation, social justice, and ingenuity in
art history in a new context. Parsing our theme, isolate from “
rewoven” the term “re-” to emphasize its
meaning of “regenerate.”
Clues
provided a hint which
Rewoven has developed.
While New York artists prosecute a provocative reweaving, more profound than
intimated by the prefix. This exhibit celebrates concept and relentlessly
questions and confronts the requisites of "Fiber Art." While weaving
itself indicates an element of reversion and repetition, it has been ready to absorb
the practical implication of the new critical regime with no delay. Works here depart from a straight line to seek
a new form and awareness, to more actively rebuild, furthermore to renew a
value judgment. And these ineluctably update our contemporary conception world.
By no means, has weaving been politically correct.
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Fig. 1 Mingjer Kuo, Suburban Housing, NJ.US.,
2012. Pigment print on drawing paper;
18 x 24 in.
Private collection.
|
Art in the past two centuries is a
direct consequence of the separation between society and real life. Yet in
reimagining fiber art from craftsmanship to a new relevance and placing it
beside new media in the forefront of the development of art. Ming-Jer Kuo has
straddled this gap. Kuo’s series Suburban
Form apparently is manual and industrial, but upon closer inspection
reveals an astonishing organic character. He challenges and expands the
parameters of weaving by interlacing dried twigs and clear plastic(Fig. 1) he takes as his
point of departure real estate maps, but he proceeds to lyrical and abstract
forms. In fact, he produces a diagram of typography of Earth in a whirlpool
caught in a spider’s web. In other work, he uses aerial views of repeating
construction patterns to rethink and review the over developed land.
ips which
subtly reflect the metallic shining in an installation. In the two-dimensional pieces,
In the history of craftsmanship, fiber art reached its zenith
in the traditional manual mode. The weaving of strand, fabric, and textiles
accompanied everywhere in the world the development of human life and
civilization. Insofar as it was pictorial, realism of the land and humankind
were valued. Fabric intertwines an infinite possibility within a simple
latitude and longitude to form a universe, but traditional weaving did not
often explore these potentialities. Going beyond conventional methods, Chin
Chih Yang uses weaving to discuss the harm we do to our earth. Using recycling
materials, for 123 Pollution Solution
in this exhibition, he chooses cans with shiny metal and dramatic labels or
brand names, cutting and reworking them into a big blanket, and then twisting
them to fit his message. And in a more direct piece, Mathematics of Light, thin, silky metal threads cut from cans are formed
into a thicket equipped with flashing LED lights and join a small video that
depicts factory chimneys polluting with endless exhaust. In Yang's oeuvre, he
deals with the environment, social justice on Wall Street, religion, and
natural disasters. Whether he uses beverage cans, manikins, video, or
unexpected lighting, his art always addresses issues of current concern.
To be in harmony with the environment, artists like Hiroshi
Jashiki blend emotional and intellectual effort to reach greatest simplicity,
sharing some methods with artisans illustrating scenes from daily folk and
personal experience. Magnificent artistic works are often produced. They result
from facets of reality, the enthusiasm of the romantic, and some are strong
fantasies depicting linear nature with a charming rhythm. Jashiki has been
working in textile design; so naturally, he takes fabric as material for his
work and experiments with color by way of textile software, creating both
realistic and highly abstract motifs to create a romantic feeling. In paintings,
curtains, triptychs, and screens, Jashiki is influenced both by Japanese
Okinawan handweaving and modern digital textile design methods.
Nice
South France 03,
 |
Fig2. Hiroshi Jashiki, Nice South France 03, 2015
70 x120 in. |
a six-panel folding silk screen, (fig. 2)is
another sample of his fabric work taking inspiration from nature; the artist
reveals the azure mysteriousness of the ever-changing ocean. The waterscape can
be viewed from both sides of the mounted silk, light passing through the transparent
screen bringing out a rigorous and impulsive feature. Diderot championed a
reconciliation of reason with feeling so as to establish harmony, insisting
that discipline is also essential to creating sublime work.
To deal with fabric in joining the conceptual with the
interactive, Lulu Meng has created an intimate piece Threshold in which cloth forms three dripping gates through which
people may walk. The artist thus discusses a way to interpret the relationship
between body and fabric The harsh metal stainless steel and sterling silver wire
in "Model" is suggestive of a corset straining a fetish in space, and
gives an ambiguous clue. In "Parts of a Whole," (Fig. 3)
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Fig3. Lulu Meng, Parts of a Whole, 2015.
Acrylic, fabric, threads, wood, clear
film and lighting box;
9 x 6 x 6 feet.
|
made in 2015, she
deftly uses fabric as a medium to address the weaving of individuals into the
larger whole that is society. Her square, cloth lightbox hanging from the ceiling
demands both appreciation from a distance as well as close scrutiny. It
adumbrates the concern that runs through many of her works – the relationship
between the individual and society.
Pieced together from fabric-like plaster components, the
white
bust of Poyen Wang’s
Construction of
intimacy signifies his healing or acclimating to a new environment. For
this piece, he smashed a 3D print sculpture to fragments then gradually sewed
it back together to form a complete face. His work is less open to the outside
world but more personal and profoundly investigates the self. Theatrically
projecting light onto a resewn face casts up an iconographic great man, and
alludes to a fake or self-content social situation. In the brave new land,
fragility morphs into apparent dominance. A formidable stitch fabric book
Atlas demonstrates both technique and
manual expertise. The prototype of a landscape was captured from a painted wall
in the New York City subway. Processing these images, he stitched together the
fabric book by assembling digital pigment prints on silk fabric. These urban and nature landscape application
to an unaware delaying motion video piece. The projection where the artist
intended to project the contraction with the rush crowd nowadays we experience
in the urban and his preferences.
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| Fig. 4 Catherine Lan, Rest Inside Me, 2017 |
In another example of highly sophisticated conceptual fiber
art, Catherine Lan has confronted the artificial and the intimate. She uses
synthetic fur to transmit feelings at once organic, feminist, as well as
exotic, in her series of "relief paintings" accomplished by cutting
fur to form new topographies of forests, mountains, and even streams. As the viewer changes position or strikes the
cut faux-fur, so too the fabric alters color and texture, resulting in
interactive scenery. In another installation piece,
Rest Inside Me, Lan creates a fetishistic, exotic phenomenon – a
hanging chair, covered with faux fur. The artificial fur, the cradle-like
chair, the festive lighting, and the enveloping music all give shelter and
reference the womb. Or from a different perspective, the work speaks to the
need to break away from the hectic importunities of quotidian life, to deny
imposed societal values, and take the time to rest and to focus on personal
balance. (fig.4)
Awareness of the essence of life is difficult. For Steven
Balogh, memory is barbed wire, looped around and around, layer on layer, and
surmounting a high wall to recall a refugee camp. By contrast, his
Money Windfall in its strict
two-dimensionality, and as in Hoffman’s
Aim
of Art, “swings and resounds to the rhythm of color” in “achiev[ing] a
three-dimensional effect by means of the creative process.”
The strokes drip color and form to then function symbolically, and the literary
or journalistic consideration has been abandoned. Fiber to Balogh brings art to
hard metal as in
Peacock in a Trap
where he arranges golf clubs in a cage-like structure, with the heads of the
golf clubs signifying peacock feathers. Playing on golf’s sand trap, he
entangles his notional peacock in an endless cycle, wire, line or metal web,
the increasingly restrictive web imposed on him by the pressures of the outer
world.
A restructuring process to a new form, constructs and might
not destruct. The reweavings we take reflect a new perspective on making from
traditional methods, new imagination leading to an unpredictable result. In
this exhibition, fiber art elides into a subtitle, thereby, seemingly into a
line, thread, fabric, or something else.
Sarah Walko’s delicate installation looks beyond traditional
weaving materials and physical constraints to ideological and conceptual possibilities.
Her works address questions related to science, ritual, land, urban areas, and
the surroundings. Walko’s reconstructed test tubes sometimes are wrapped
together as sacrificial objects, or displayed along with small objects. She carefully arranges various sized
materials then crosses air and space tightening thin threads to frame an
astrologic and philosophical structure that transmits sublime and mystical
notions of the universe. Glass Orchestra
entails a constellation of test tubes united by fanciful trails of fabric. This
Glass Orchestra installation is a
performance. It exposes an exquisite beauty that reveals a quiet melody to us
and those within the glass test tubes.
With a scientific and mechanical background, John Ensor
Parker has conceived a science-based video entitled Multiverse that encapsulates formulae from Einstein’s theory,
numbers which form and reform, dissolving into a series of words, and lines
which merge into a surface. The digits, numbers, letters fly from a glowing sphere.
His mapping pieces on buildings impose upon their targets light, motion, and
another dimension. In this Multiverse,
a time-space grid crosses the entire world both spiritual and virtual, drawing
on both literature and science. Mirroring the entwining of images on the visual
level, the light beams themselves are arrays of chains of photons. And LCDs,
used ubiquitously in computer monitors, depend on a tapestry of pixels and the
warp and woof of polarizing filters. (Fig.5)
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| Fig5. John Ensor Parker, Multiverse, 2016 |
We build up a net that is destabilizing and transformative
for ourselves and outside people. These artists reweave a world of creativity
to reflect their surroundings. No matter whether this presentation is
philosophical, minimal, literary, conceptual, abstract, or commentary on beauty
or on the grotesque; the concept of fiber art in New York section has exceeded
the capacities for a conventional control and rational comprehension. Equipped
with a changing global point of view, especially in view of our expanded
connectivity and reach globally, we chafe at the restrictions sometimes
enforced.
