Traditional media often speak toward a poetry of the past. Of the hands of the grandmother. Of the voice of the ancestor. However, in the early 21st century the medium of textiles has come to absorb the affect of the digital age: embedding within their loops and frays at once our nostalgia for a deep material physication, so oft denied in an age of the alienation of social media, and our yearning for better, brighter, more just tomorrow built upon the promise of technological progress.
The textile works presented in our Louder Now show are based on the artists' experimentation with traditional weaving and sewing techniques, as well as a deep understanding of their heritage and identity which is often connected with hand-made objects. They do not resist the digital world; they re-weave its textures as their own creation. From a fertile ground for postcolonial critique in the work of Jeffrey Gibson, April Bey, and Sarah Zapata, to considerations of identity and personal relations in the work of Erick Medel and Jeanne F. Jalandoni; from meditation on trauma and violence in the work of Erin M. Riley and Spandita Malik, to the aesthetics of activism and care in work of Dagnini and Claudia Hill, each artist’s oeuvre conveys their unique and critical understanding of the world in which we now live, conveyed through objects of material culture.
Combining digitally printed fabric depicting elements of his previous sculptural totemic work, quilting techniques and geometric patterns that draw on his Native American heritage, and bold colors denoting modernist influences, Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson composes large textile collages, marrying both analog and digital elements. As he states, “In indirect ways, I’m always looking to metaphorically describe community, to describe egalitarian politics, and to disassemble the hierarchy of the mediums.”
Digital collages composed of found imagery of individuals of African descent transformed into jacquard fabric, and then heavily reworked with hand-sewed elements, form the foundation of April Bey’s work. An introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, Bey’s oeuvre weaves together the forces of feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, and post-colonialism.
“Textiles have such a transformative quality that speaks to labor and luxury and protection,” says Sarah Zapata in interview; the artist combines Peruvian weaving techniques and American rug-making traditions. Aesthetically speaking, Zapata’s use of stripes calls on Christianity and reads the form’s contentious history as class coded, from the rebellious symbol of the American flag through to the jail stripe. As she states. “There is biblical text that says one should not wear a cloth made of two, so from the medieval period onward, the stripe has been a way to designate poor people and outcasts of society.” Added faces reflecting on pre-Columbian civilization, the Moche, appear as anti-gender figures from an anti-hero society.
Meanwhile, personal upheaval and the affect of trauma inform Erin M. Riley’s handwoven textiles. In her modern still lives of digital citations, cut-outs of screenshots of Google searches, Facebook and Instagram posts, a variety of pictures from the ‘downloads’ folder used as a sketchbook, Riley meticulously crafts representations of personal relations and their aftermath, which speak to the condition of female lived experience in a pervasively misogynist digital landscape.
Likewise, domestic violence and massive ignorance of women’s rights in India became a starting point for Spandita Malik’s work, made in collaboration with members of self-help groups located in Lucknow, Jaipur, and Chamkaur Sahib. They combine portraits of women printed on the traditional local fabric of the region with traditional embroidery, made by those same women, over the imagery, transforming each work into a sculptural object. This work also engages the problem of the gaze in portrait photography, addressed by giving women control over their own mode of representation.
In terms of meditations on identity, Erick Medel, born in Mexico and now living in the US, explores conflicting ideas of selfhood and stereotype, often utilizing imagery borrowed directly from his heavily Chicano neighborhood in East Los Angeles. Capturing his source material digitally on his phone, the artist transforms these mis-en-scenes into machine-sewed, semi-sculptural, and hard-edged tableaux.
Similarly, for Jeanne F. Jalandoni, a second-generation US immigrant, textile is a medium of narrative: one which, existing between a heritage of craft and a contemporary reality as fine art, allows her to investigate her own dual signification or bicultural heritage. Examining her Filipino-American identity and attendantly the aftermath of Spanish and American colonization in the Pacific Island nation, Jalandoni’s canvases, small or larger-than-life, depict warm, welcoming familial portraits and scenes, ancestral or quotidian.
For Dagnini, an activist and dissident artist from Russia, her small work in this exhibition provided the artist an opportunity to further explore her meme series that she began during the pandemic. She uses vintage figurative rags and tapestries, reworking their narrative with embroidered signs. Starting with Windows ’95/98 aesthetics, she now moves forward with Instagram-like, simple geometric shapes that contrast the baroque surfaces, inspired by contemporary digital aesthetics.
A final and essential part of this exhibition, Berlin-based artist Claudia Hill’s video ‘Konvoi’ presents the viewer with an experimental short film with a Sci-Fi touch centered around planetary care. The work depicts a group of travelers of unknown origin who, over the course of a day, explore and scan the environment with their unique handmade triangular antennae. They, like us, search for a future in this strange new world, digital or otherwise.
