Issue 168

newamericanpaintings.com

The not-so-secret use of those special objects to which we do not assign uses.

Christian Thorne’s review of Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Duke 2019).

Unwinding is an undoing of that which is ‘wound.’ If the ‘wound’ is defined as a form that demonstrates wholeness, cohesion, similarity, and closure, ‘Unwinding’ is an undoing of that structure.

Yet the fifteen artworks represented in Unwinding / Unwound do not undercut the complexities of the whole. Instead the collection of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and textiles advance new physical properties, patterns, and labor operations that underscore higher levels of visual and conceptual organization. Each work combines a vast interplay between foundational components such as figure-ground relationships, symmetry, and texture gradients with a range of intricate cognitive factors such as attention, memory, intimacy, and identity narration in order to gain a more complete understanding of the function of the whole, or the as the exhibition title would suggest, the ‘wound.’

In this exhibition, the act of “unwinding” is paradoxically additive. The impetus driving the work in the exhibition does not arise from the need to abolish cohesive traditions. Instead, each work possesses an energetic momentum to protract all-to-familiar art forms by translating, rearticulating, and unwinding and rewinding the components of material practices. Yet subtle disloyalties to traditional assumptions regarding craft, tradition, language, meaning, and interpretation murmur. But destabilization is not evident, nor is it the goal of the artists represented in the exhibition. Moreover, the binary oppositions between functionality and non-functionality, skill and concept, technique and expression, reproducibility and uniqueness, tradition and innovation are simply conceptual hindrances to the eleven artists who ‘unwind,’ not as an act of critique, but as an act of discovery.

Monica Mohnot’s organic contours materialize from representations of bodies, landscapes, and invented abstract patterns. The three stretched woven works included in the exhibition are from Mohnot's “Whimsey Series” (2023) and take their historical signals from early twentieth-century formal and stylist vocabularies. Matisse’s cut-outs are evoked by the hovering flat graphic shapes that adhere to densely woven surfaces. Mohnot writes that “the inner becomes outer, and vice versa…this softens the lines between the real and the imagined or remembered.” Hand stitching becomes linework, punctuating the colorful abstractions with stuttering energies that contrast the boldness of her intense shapes. The works are simultaneously vibrant abstractions and subjective figurative investigations. These three woven paintings are also open to re-interpretations driven by various factors such as changing social contexts, evolving knowledge or perspectives, or even the desire to expand on Mohnot’s subjective meanings and narrativized identity that ground the work's conceptual framework.

The same openness can be said for Gigi Gastevich’s “Estate Sale Clocks,” an unframed paper composition composed of pigmented cotton pulp. Its grid-like arrangement takes its pattern from a distorted Facebook estate-sale image. Pixels become color blocks while the work’s material qualities underscore the temporal topography of loosely compressed fibers. It scarcely coheres as its colors and surface actively vibrate yet its geometric logic evokes an analytical imaging system. Gastevich articulates a working method located “between [the] computer generated and the human-crafted,” but the absorbent atomization of clumped two-dimensional material suggests a unique corporal body that is incompatible with the digital realm.

Iona Bodem’s Bruises Tapestry also evokes the topographical, yet it is a composition derived from an image depicting blunt bodily impact. Ruptured blood vessels and broken capillaries create an abstracted image that conveys the characteristic discoloration of a bruise. Dull red and brown shapes pool and clot in an organic distribution of oxygenated blood flooding the image-area of the weaving with an irregular. In an ironic juxtaposition, the textile hosts conventional fringes and decorative banding that perverts traditional form with bodily damage.

Observing that her research is informed by the questioning of “the impermanence and the abundant excess of contemporary hyper-production,” Krista Cibis’s free-standing retro-verso work titled “Fighting Words” is poignantly germane. A spectacular sequined sign tethered with ribbon to a free-standing garment rack and sporting a silk tail-like ballast that hangs down to the floor, the rolling sculpture works like a floating signifier, recontextualizing cultural spaces and altering social hierarchies. “Fighting Words” is a work that gestures to both excessive labor and the speed of consumption. Moreover, its mantra and concepts are both contemporaneous and vintage with conceptual similarities to Delaina Doshi’s “Untitled” (2023) formable constructions of wired-together broken porcelain shards embellished with cascading lengths of gold chains. Doshi’s wall-based assemblage made from familiar and fragmented articles tied into a weighty mass is an intentional complication to the set of cultural values assigned to cheap collectibles, decorative functional ware, and personal adornments. The piece re-assemblages display onto a unique and unfamiliar organization that is at odds with a curio cabinet, jewelry box, or thrift store display. Its deliberate formal arrangements of color and pattern, suspension, and gravity insist on understanding the relief through the lens of a sculptural invention before we see it as an artifact of consumption and taste.

Elizabeth Joo’s white scroll is over thirty feet long. The text is recorded in white thread and stitched precisely and seemingly endlessly in registrars’ comments on the ubiquitous news feed, marquee, or social media scroll. Yet Joo’s informational content is that of “translating documented emotions directly into fiber.” Emotion Documentation: Chart (2023) is “a venture aimed at comprehending emotions through a rational lens, blending scientific and mathematical approaches,” while also serving as discipline and mental training that has therapeutic consequences for the artist and the viewer. While Mariana Norena’s Untitled (Lake Michigan) (2023) also employs suspended vertical lengths of white fabric as support for stitched abstract articulations and mark-making, Norena’s contribution to the exhibition has a close relationship to drawing and its ability to focus and command mindful concentration. Meandering lines are composed of slow delineated stitches that slightly pucker and reverberate in the fields of surrounding silk. And like Mohnot’s nod to anatomy in her shape-intimated painterly textile practice, Norena’s stitched drawings too evoke the body as a landscape where “the process of meditating and being mindful of the landscape” can be attended.

River contributed two works to Unwinding / Unwound. “Threading drawing #5” is an abstracted Xiaoshen lace composition composed of white thread mounted to a linen panel. Its forms are organic and playful like animated profiles culled from the plant kingdom. The graphic work feels like an elegant specimen of craft and imagination while River’s second contribution, “edges*negative spaces” is a delicate weaving that imparts painterly depth. Its pictural qualities are heightened but its hand-dyed thread and orange Plexiglass frame. The work is a celebration of traditional techniques which River absorbed from a lineage of skilled female artisans. Building an artistic identity within historical and cultural craftwork, River furthers familiar textile traditions through formal and stylistic invention while demonstrating admirable technical dexterity.

“I lay on the earth to remember the touch of your skin,” is a collaborative installation by Anne Skaug and Katie Wolfe. A minimalist landscape punctuated with many casted geometric solids, dried grasses, and freestanding wooden frames that function like portals to other environments' temporalities. The clumps of desiccated vegetation locked into their solid blocks are indexed to a growing condition that has not become static. Like the structuralist qualities of Lars von Trier’s film “Dogville” (2003), this installation eliminates the distinctions between past and present, public and private, and inside and outside. More specifically, Anne Skaug suggests that the work also evokes “the intersections between gender, labor, the domestic, and generational trauma.” In juxtaposition with Sitong Yin’s horizontal hand-woven Jacquard weaving titled Long Scroll #2 (2023) Anne Skaug and Katie Wolfe’s installations deploys ambiguity to instill perturbation and disquietude.

Yin’s sweeping horizon instead elevates harmonious “poetic wandering.” Writing that the work is responsive “to philosophical contemplation on the passage of space, time, and life and death” Yin’s minimal image composed of stipulated land formations against an empty sky is barely pictorial. The transposition of the landscape into a wooly tactile evokes conditions of the transcendental, especially those philosophical conditions inherent in Chinese landscape tradition as well as the romantic paintings by Casper David Friedrich.

Erica Dincalci writes that her “work is largely autobiographically referential, using embodied weaving and cloth as a form of storytelling, mapping and abstracting the lived experience.” Her two contributions to the exhibition “Untitled” and “Soft Boundaries” are bright and responsive. Without ambiguity, both works simultaneously embrace joy and coherence, pliability and structure, audacity and resiliency. “My works hold the multitudes that we embody,” Dincalci broadly claims. It is a profoundly accurate statement that can be attributed to all of the works in Unwinding / Unwound. It is a statement that closely corresponds to Anne Alber’s assertion that “we often look for an underlying meaning of things while the thing itself is the meaning.” Perhaps then, the “unwound” in this exhibition is simply the “embodied” or the “thing itself.”