F I B R A T I O N: Poking back
September 4th - October 26th
Opening Reception: September 12th, 6 - 8 pm
Exhibition Tour with Curator Lisa Rockford on
Saturday, September 14th, 1 pm
Holly Ballard Martz | Mona Bozorgi | Martin Casuso | Marjolein Dallinga | Marina Font |Lauren Gregory | Marik Lechner | Tasha Lewis | Kayla Mattes | Nico Mazza |Rosemary Meza-DesPlas | Elisa Ortega Montilla | Jennifer Pettus | Katarina Riesing | Erin M. Riley | Alicia Ross
L’Space Gallery is proud to announce this group exhibition of sixteen artists with fresh and compelling approaches to fiber and textile art, on view from September 3rd through October 26th, 2024, with an opening reception on September 12th, 2024. This is L’Space Gallery’s second contemporary textile exhibition, building on the momentum of their inaugural textile show in 2023, “Fibration,” which included artists Michelle Segre, Melissa Dadourian, and Liz Collins, who months later exhibited in the 2024 Venice Biennale.
L’Space gallery director Lili Almog was excited to add further recognition of textiles' transformative power and dive deeper into this growing movement by emphasizing a more specific focus related to the human body and asked curator Lisa Rockford to develop the theme, as they specialize in seeking out emerging voices in contemporary textiles and drawing parallels between divergent methods on a theme. In 2013, Rockford featured forty fiber artists in the survey “Fiber Optics,” and recently opened another group exhibition in South Florida entitled “Semantic Textiles.”
The curatorial concept for Fibrations: Poking Back explores the vast possibilities for symbolism through textiles, showcasing their distinctive ability to convey complex emotional and social themes, while demonstrating the power of this growing movement of fiber artists as a feminist community. Building on foundational artists like Louise Bourgeois, Sarah Lucas, and Judith Scott, who helped reclaim handicrafts from their domestic origins by imbuing sewn and beaded figurative sculptures with raw and candid expressions of pain and vulnerability, the next generation has continued to fight patriarchal and oppressive influences with fiber arts by crafting empowering, symbolic, and subversive shields for the body – especially visible with the sea of pink pussyhats crocheted and worn at the Women’s March in 2017 (in reaction to Donald Trump’s “I can grab them by the pussy…” quote).
Considering these inspirations, Rockford selected a diverse range of established and emerging voices that are crafting this new face of fiber arts and whose expressions continue to be unapologetic. Soft, playful materials are embedded with unflinching compositions and potent messages. The artists re-examine societal norms surrounding identity, sexuality, and gender formation, exploring the body as a site of both vulnerability and resilience, while offering personal mechanisms of strength, self-defense, and liberation. Lauren Gregory reacted to the unearthing of JD Vance’s derogatory remarks about “childless cat ladies” in her newest fur painting Catlady, created for this exhibit, which depicts an unashamed selfie pose of her smiling at the audience while her lower body is bare legs spread in stirrups, exposed for examination.
Several artworks, scrutinize, manipulate, and augment the body as material manifestations of objectification that expose the historically pervasive masculine gaze and other destructive influences. Prime Cuts by Holly Ballard Martz at first looks alluring, covered in glittering shiny pink sequins, yet upon closer inspection depicts slabs of meat mixed with disembodied female genitalia, while here beaded and quilted punching bag celebrates female strength. Elisa Ortega Montilla carved wood and remnants of lingerie into unexpected biomorphic shapes in her whimsical series Anatomias, and Objectifying, while Martin Casuso lightheartedly offers the queer male perspective of vulnerability and objectification in a site-specific display of thirty different embellished and pierced yarn “knit dicks” from his (fancy) pain/pleasure series.
Central to the exhibition is a monumental, 25-foot hand-woven tapestry, The Hidden Crisis by Erin M. Riley. Her weavings combine images of her and other women’s bodies, news headlines, and found images to create starkly intimate and confronting visual conversations around trauma, violence, memory, fantasy, coming of age, and relationships. In contrast, Kayla Mattes has woven vividly colorful and humorous montages of pop cultural representations of the body and discomfort. Mattes created a new work for the exhibit with the text “I have cramps and I’m mad at the government.” Though many artists have adopted digital weaving processes, Riley and Mattes employ methodical hand-crafted processes. Riley sources the raw wool that she washes, strips, and hand dyes and weaves her works on a Macomb loom.
Tasha Lewis incorporates the historical framework of ancient Greece by appropriating poses of broken goddesses into resolute life-size sculptures covered with fabric collage, embroidery, and hand-punched wire for hair, while Alicia Ross deconstructs fragments of females from pornography as sizable, cross-stitched canvases, highlighting their bodily contortions and emotive expressions.
While this exhibition has layers of meaning, it also celebrates the seductive aesthetic, tactile allure, laborious craftsmanship, and timeless appeal of fiber art materials throughout. Jennifer Pettus arduously combines a wide array of alluring textiles like fabric, lace, tulle, knotting, and quilting with discarded detritus and textures like plastic and vinyl into figurative abstractions. The most painstaking, intricate embroidery technique is used by Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, who stitched portrayals of women with guns by patiently threading her needle with single threads of human hair. Katarina Reising tenderly applies painted layers of dye and delicate embroidery on raw silk to depict scarred and bound bodies while Marik Lechner uses a yarn tufting gun with expressive movements akin to a painter’s brushstrokes. Marina Font creates a dialogue between biology and psychology, exploring social and private personas through manipulated black-and-white images with embroidering onto the body and photographs and reconnects with memory, telling stories that emerge from deep within.
The selected artworks offer a transgressive and thought-provoking experience that frees the domestic arts from their bindings and challenges the viewer to reconsider the role of fiber art in contemporary discourse and social commentary.
About the curator:
Lisa Rockford (she/they) is an independent curator, professor, and artist based in South Florida, who holds a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2001). Rockford has curated over 30 projects over the past 12 years and worked with over 400 artists, has been commissioned to curate for The Torrance Art Museum, Doral Contemporary Art Museum, Bailey Contemporary Arts, Whitespace collection, and to provide public lectures for The Perez Museum of Art, The Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Young at Art Museum, Bowling Green State University, Dillard School of the Arts, and Art Nexus Magazine at Art Basel Miami Beach since 2011, and The Armory Show NYC fair since 2019.