Johansson Projects Presents Thread, an Art Show Exploring Raw Materials and Loomed Refinements From Talking Textiles to 500 Magnified Thread Spools Suspended from the Ceiling.
Featuring Works by:
Kathryn Spence
Tucker Schwarz
Christy Matson
Steve MacDonald
Devorah Sperber
Katie Lewis
Alex Case
Lia Cook
Opening Thurs, July 19th, 6 to 9, with an Encore for Art Murmur on August 3rd, 5 to 9.
Johansson Projects announces Thread, a survey of sewn, stitched and woven works whose common thread is the media, not the medium. By re-exploring the functional avenues of textiles and materials, these eight artists begin to converse in a neo-craft dialect which diverges greatly from its domestic and industrial traditions. Pins are re-invented as figurative joinery, refuse amassed to render owls, interactive fabric measures changes in electro-magnetic frequencies, making the outcome from these dexterous hands undeniably rare.
The show draws from the prolific work of eight local and internationally shown artists. Celebrated New York artist and lecturer, Devorah Sperber is coming straight from a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum to the corner of 23rd and Telegraph. She navigates the terrain between low and high tech, sculpting with hundreds of thread spools to compose what at first appears to be a colorful abstraction of the raw material, but when viewed through an acrylic globe is suddenly a perfectly rendered image, condensed and rotated. Katie Lewis elegantly documents her physical sensations by pinning tightly gathered then sprawling red pigmented webs of thread across the gallery walls. University of California Berkeley alumni Steve MacDonald, just back from Deitch Art Parade, constructs urban and natural scapes from his old singer sewing machine on painted gold canvas with crimson thread embroidery, while Alex Case’s plummeting industrial stitched creations produce and unproduce themselves. Kathryn Spence, courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery, is collected by multiple museums including the de Young, Oakland Museum, and SFMOMA, amasses scrap fabrics from clothing and disassembled stuffed animals to delicately re-render the distinctive features of an owl species. Tucker Schwarz, courtesy of Gregory Lind Gallery, whose work appears in By Hand: The use of craft in contemporary art, sews evaporative drawings with threads dangling from her canvas to match her dreamlike recollection of middle class neighborhoods.
Two artists work from the loom. Lia Cook, collected by the Cleveland Museum, de Young, The Met, and NYMOMA and her former student, Christy Matson, who currently lectures at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, both utilize Jacquard weaving looms though their kinship divides from there: Matson’s interactive woven audio cloth relays the constant human flux of the very space Cook’s pointillist portraiture hopes to hold in a single woven moment.
Johansson Projects is an art gallery located on 2300 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA (510) 444-9140 www.johanssonprojects.com.
Exhibition runs July 19th-Aug 25th.
Open: Thurs-Sun 12-6 and by appointment.
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What a unique medium. You don't think of it as such a distinct art form until you actually see it in exhibition. Fascinating and very beautiful. Carol
When I was 5 yrs old I lived in Staten Island NY in the same apartment that a New York City illustrator for a large newspaper lived. He was so kind. He would take up time with me and show me his work. I never, ever forgot that introduction to art. I can see us sitting in the sunshine on the terraced rose garden, enjoying the beauty of the roses, and his instruction simultaneously. Carol