April 11 – June 27, 2010
11-03 45th Ave
Long Island City 718 937 6317

Six artists who make works that resemble quilts have been gathered together at the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City in an exhibition called Assembling Narratives: Quilting Impulses in Contemporary Art.   The show, curated by Donna Harkavy Flavia S. Zúñiga-West, draws from a diverse group of mostly women who are using with quilting techniques in a variety of ways.

Traditional quilting is a communal activity; made in quilting circles or “bees.” It offers rich associations: family, tradition, home, bed, hand, the individual and their relationship to the community.  Quilts were made for a significant time in a woman’s life and usually displayed the creative thrifty-ness of materials; the idea that things must be re-purposed and useful for generations to come.  Traditional quilts also offered women an outlet for astonishing creativity in the piecing together of materials, as evidenced by the magnificent quilts of Gee’s Bend.  As quilts began to move off the bed and onto the wall, it was inevitable that they began to be seen in relationship to painting and drawing.

It is a rich field for an artist to explore and contemporary female artists began to incorporate elements of quilting in the 1970s as both a way to empower the materials and techniques of craft and to reject the “male dominated” materials of traditional painting and sculpture.

Faith Ringgold is a pioneering figure in this genre.  Her work from the 1980’s combines elements of story telling, painting and quilting in her “story quilts.” On display at the Dorsky Gallery, No More War Stories Quilt and No More War Stories Part II records the memories of African American wives and mothers of GI’s from the Vietnam War.  The stories are written in vernacular, by hand along the borders of the quilt, which also includes tie-dyed and camouflage fabric.  The stories are poignant, fragile, tender and personal, which matches nicely with the feeling of the artist’s hand in the writing and visible stitching.

Sabrina Gschwandtner uses strips of 16mm film to make her intricate and labor-intensive translucent quilts.  The films are painstakingly sewn together in a traditional strip quilt pattern and are shown on a giant light box.  Upon close inspection, you can make out tiny figures and images in the strips and the resulting quilts have a rosy coloring of decayed 1960’s film.  Strip quilts were an exceptionally thrifty way to make use of even the smallest scrap fabric. Gschwandtner also used a salvaged material: the films are educational shorts deaccessioned from the Fashion Institute of Technology that cover topics such as the history of fashion, textiles and (appropriately enough) quilting.  The titles, Quilts in Women’s Lives and Once Upon a Sunny Morning refer to the films from which the quilts are constructed.

Donna Sharrett’s large decorated doilies are composed of a laundry list of materials–rose petals, hair, lace, pearls, rings, silk, old pennies, bone–much of which has personal significance to the artist that is not necessarily conveyed to the viewer without reading her artist statement.  The rose window composition and variety of materials has a Victorian feel. The titles of her two works, Forever Young and The Long Black Veil, hint of a personal tragedy.

John Sims, the only male artist in the show, investigates quilting as a community activity and his African heritage by using African fabrics and black squares in a checkerboard grid.  Each black square features an embroidered black square, and the title, My Square Roots, brings home the pun.  He sought out the help of an Amish quilting group to learn the technique.  Sims is also the only artist who combines quilting and video: a projection of another checkerboard quilt is projected onto the floor.  But this one, maddeningly out of focus and too dim for the space, was less revealing.  HyperQuilt was composed of images of 13 other quilts plus some images of the artist.  According to Sims’ artist statement, it was created by a mathematical process relating to p and a spiral number sequence with traditional Amish colors assigned to the numbers, although this was not evident in the projection.

The most stunning and interesting work in the exhibition was from Anna Von Mertens.   Unlike the other works that were made by assemblage of materials, this work is one solid piece of fabric that is dyed to read like a landscape.  The luminous hand-dyed color goes from a dark blue on the top to a golden yellow strip at the bottom, like the first pale light of dawn in an utterly featureless landscape.  White stitches of varying length and thickness arc over the dark sky like time-lapse photos of the movement of the stars.  The title, Dawn (Left Illinois for California, April 15, 1859) refers to an inscription on an 19^th century quilt made by two pioneer families as they are about to head west for California.  The stitching refers to exact star movements, plotted by a computer, in the hours that led up to dawn on this date.  The work embodies all the hope and fear of a significant moment in time without depicting the story in a way that is genuinely satisfying.

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on view in Apocalyptic Pop, curated by Kathy Goncharov at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, opening today, 2-5pm at 11-03 45th Avenue, Long Island City, 718 937 6317, through January 25.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2008.

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November 20 – January 30, 2006

Immediately to the left as one enters the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City is a hypnotic carnival-like mirror made by the French artist Philippe Ramette. Punctuated within Its bent polished surface are several protrusions, which on closer inspection create perfect miniature reflections while the rest of the object dramatically distorts the entire space in front of it.

These precise reflections within Ramette’s piece are a fitting metaphor for the carefully articulated themes of the mirror in this exhibition titled Beyond Narcissus.The show’s French curator Soko Phay-Vakalis has been working on the mirror in contemporary art for almost a decade and this exhibition for over two years. Her focus is specific: “non-narcissistic” mirrors that attempt to move beyond mimetic illusion. She describes the goal of the exhibition: “…to reveal the different uses of the mirror in private spaces and public places, explore new reflections (silver paint, sheet metal), and reconsider the issue of identity in new approaches to the world and to memory.”

Phay-Vakalis establishes four thematic categories into which she places the work:the mirror in contemporary vanities, mirrors and displacements, empty mirrors, and abyssal mirrors. These categories become the lens with which to understand the individual works and thus the entire show. As a result of this very specific approach great care went into choosing each work. The outcome is an exciting combination of New York based artists like John L. Moore, Dennis Adams and Alfredo Jaar and French artists like Ramette, Pascal Pinaud, and Philippe Segond, who have rarely been seen in the US.

Both Adams and Jaar’s work are used to illustrate the theme of “the mirror in contemporary vanities.” Adams piece titled Vanity for Patty Hearst (1997) replicates the kind of vanity found in a dressing room. It has a shelf and two vertical rows of four spherical light bulbs on either side of a mirror, except here the mirror is darkened glass making the reflected image distant and ghostly. The title connects to a shared memory of someone who was once visible but who now is absent. The faintness of the image in the fake mirror evokes the distance of this memory and places the viewer within its history.

Similarly, Jaar in his work simply titled Mirror (2004) addresses the viewers’ conscience and self-awareness. At first glance his piece looks like an ordinary mirror in an aluminum frame, but at close distance the viewer’s self-image shifts to an image of a dirty mine worker. It’s a shocking reversal from an image of the self to an image of the other, of someone not considered, of someone forgotten, who represents the invisible production of the disenfranchised populations of the world.

Ferran Martin, a Spanish artist now living in New York, presents three performances displayed on video titled El Modular. These works represent the theme of mirrors and displacement. In the performances Martin wears a mirrored cube on his head and wanders around the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the Queens Museum of Art. While wearing this custom headgear the artist cannot see. He essentially becomes blind, but yet reflects everything around him. There is a sadness and contradiction in seeing so many images created on the artists head but knowing he can see none of them. There is also a sense of fear that at any moment the artist in his blindness might smash his perfect headgear into hundreds of little pieces.

The richly hued blue painting of John L. Moore is positioned in the theme ofEmpty Mirrors. At first appearance it looks like a completely abstract composition, but soon one notices that the space within the large vertical oval shape just off-center to the right appears to subtly reflect some other part of the blue field. This oval becomes a separate space connected to but distinct from the rest of the image. As a result it appears as a void within the composition and amid the blue field it carries with it a feeling of loss and loneliness.

Abyssal Mirrors is the last of Phay-Vakalis’ categories and it includes the paintings of Pascal Pinaud and Philippe Segond. Pinaud for his work titled Blanc Perle Chrysler, 01A14 Juillet-Octobre (2001) uses automotive paint on sheet metal for his monochromatic vertical image. This painting, with its shiny white surface and curious random white and brown accumulations, he describes as a Chrysler parked under a tree with bird droppings. Here the gallery recontextualizes this work and the specific subject vanishes. The effect is a simulation, a kind of mirroring of reality through the work of art.

Segond’s painting titled Detail 29 “Miroir”(2001) is a haunting double abstraction made with silvery metallic pigment and other industrial paints that don’t easily mix together. Segond made these paintings in a matter of minutes by applying the paint and allowing the various pigments to react on the surface. He accepts the basic fact that paintings become visible only as a result of reflected light. Thus Segond paints the idea of the mirror, it’s shimmering surface and radiant glow. His paintings are a surrogate for the real mirror and ultimately they suggest its disappearance.

In 1936 Jacques Lacan presented his concept of the mirror stage. This established the fundamental importance of the mirror in defining the ego through its dependence on an image of the self in relation to external objects or the other.Phay-Vakalis acknowledges this seminal psychoanalytic proposition, but outlines her own thesis. She addresses the specific experience of the mirror in our current moment in history: “The disappearance of the world’s clarity goes hand in hand with the loss of the subject.”  She accepts that mirroring is no longer strictly mimetic—it is a constant simultaneous experience of our technological age and occurs so frequently it often goes unnoticed.

As a whole the show hinges on Phay-Vakalis’ rigorous approach to the subject. If all of the work and the related texts were studied carefully it would be hard for anyone to look at a mirror the same way again. There is no question that this is excellent scholarship, but sometimes it places too much pressure on the individual works and feels like a level of mediation, particularly with this installation, that diminishes a greater potential interaction between the different pieces. Yet here it is worthwhile to consider that this is a long-term project—a website has just been launched () and future exhibitions are planned. With this in mind the show feels like a beginning, the first exhibition of something much bigger still to come that will extend beyond the walls of the Dorsky Gallery into undiscovered territory.

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