2022 Textiles and Fiber Art Juried Exhibition

Tuesday, January 4, 2022 to Friday, April 22, 2022

German City Church, artist Annette Guy Family is what makes us who we are. My family is very important to me and they have instilled values and beliefs in me that I still hold on to today. I remember as a young child seeing a photograph of my grandparents in long white christening gowns. I remember thinking about how beautiful the image was. When I started this body of work I knew that I wanted to create cyanotype images on christening gowns. I am working with my mom who is the seamstress on the gowns. My grandmother taught my mom how to sew. The dresses I create are the blueprint of the strong women in my family. The images have a nostalgic feeling to them even though they are my views on who I am. My family spent a lot of Sundays at German City Church, or the church on the hill. My grandparents are both buried here. Photo by Annette Guy
Scroll Set: Seasonal Drawings 2021, artist Astrid Bennet Over decades, my work has always embraced expressive painted, printed and dyed textiles. My current bodies of work, Tarps and Scrolls, add a drawing practice and mixed media to those textiles. Metaphorically, I see tarps as protective, versatile, adaptive. These explore the role of art in our fraught, modern world ruled by technology and uncertainty. Part object, part theater set, these pieces can be used interchangeably in standard exhibitions or temporarily, in indoor and outdoor installations. Scrolls and tarps accompany me on travels, with opportunities for drawing and photography in unaccustomed settings. During the pandemic, they became a vehicle for using drawing to chart the seasons in my pandemic garden. Handpainting, drawing, stitching; cotton fabric, chemical & natural dyes, India ink, polymer medium, eyelets. Photo by Astrid Bennett
Shadow Play, artist Barbara Trout The ensemble was created to contrast the concepts of geometric divisions on the body with the organic neckpiece. The gown was formed in layers of blue and sand colored organza to play on the transparency of the fabrics creating a variety of tones. The hand-woven neckpiece has a hand-woven foundation that was hand-beaded with stones, glass beads, wooden and metal beads. The gown was created using a technique of draping which involved merging geometric fabric pieces in relation to the body and movement. Photo by Barbara Trout
Inland Surveying, artist Catherine Reinhart I am an interdisciplinary artist who makes fiber art and conducts socially engaged projects with abandoned textiles. These works center on the themes of domestic labor, connection and care. Caregiving girds up our society and is based largely on the undervalued labor of women. Tending to one’s family and community is built on consistent, repetitive actions which provide comfort, ease suffering, and connect us with our fellow man. Mending and stitching by hand parallel these tending actions. By using them, I join the emerging discourse on the unseen contributions of women and mothers to our social fabric and the contemporary art world. Through the reuse of found textiles and ritualistic processes, I communicate the transformative power of caregiving. As artist and mother, I am both archivist and field hand, creating studies in the accretion of domestic life and cataloging its labors. I disassemble, reconfigure, and alter abandoned textiles into flag works. Stratums of fiber in my sculptures reference sedimentary layers and the state of my laundry pile. I map the territory of my home-place with the visual language of topographic maps. With these works, I join the growing ranks of a constellation of new artist-mothers giving voice to the maternal and domestic experience. Inland Surveying is a green and white fiber work in six sections created by tracing my children’s dirty laundry, using free motion stitching and inspired by trapunto quilting techniques. The discarded clothing items were the genesis for sewn marks mimicking topographical maps. It is an imagined and quilted landscape, a map of the home-place. Photo by Catherine Reinhart
Pandemic Isolation Blues, artist Constance Collins Pandemic Isolation Blues provides an abundance of disjointed patterns and textures that befits those times when our routine was shredded & shrouded in angst. There is no dominant element so the viewer is confronted with many stimuli of equal weight. To completely absorb it requires some time & then the imagination kicks in. Are those leaves floating down a stream? What about that one spot of bright green– is there something underneath the layers or does it represent hope for a greener tomorrow in our ocean? I want to engage a viewer’s imagination in the same way that cloud formations used to stimulate mine when I was a child. The 2020 pandemic tore apart the fabric of our lives and replaced it with uncertainty, doubt, confusion and danger. It forced an isolation which led to contemplation for many folks. One positive outcome was the chance to slow down and catch one’s breath (without a ventilator) for the first time in a long while. We realized that the hyper-fast pace of fashion/news/social media ad nauseum wasn’t healthy for us or the planet. A new appreciation for a slower, deliberate lifestyle emerged–one that many artists and craftspeople, including me, already embraced. upcycled handwoven alpaca, silk & bamboo fabrics Photo by Constance Collins
What Unites Us, artist Danielle Shelley What Unites Us is a four-panel stitched work combining contemporary political button slogans with decorative motifs from American and English samplers of the late 17th century up to 1820—a period whose ideals and contradictions form the background of our own troubled time. The slogans, taken from commercially available buttons, range from Lincoln and Washington quotes to the Bible and topical issues. I began wearing political buttons daily in 2016, both to express my feelings and to remind myself that the times were not normal. But after a while, my friends were so used to my new habit that they stopped reading the buttons. Being a fiber artist, I wondered whether I could get people to read them if I embroidered the slogans large and surrounded them with beautiful stitching. And so, this project – my first piece of political art – was born. I researched antique samplers and collected reference materials for several years and began to stitch in October 2019. When I started to pick the slogans, I discovered that what mattered to me was not to express my own politics but to find messages that might cross America’s destructive partisan divide. Panels 1 and 3 are in the Quaker sampler form, a cross stitch style taught in Quaker boarding schools in both the U.S. and England in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Panels 2 and 4 use the older band sampler style, which includes both cross stitch and blackwork stitching. I hope it can remind Americans who see it that both sides in our divided nation share a history and values that can bring us back into community. Photo by Danielle Shelley
A Very Good Boy, artist Dennis Carroll Primarily, I draw and paint and have always wanted to make clothes but didn’t have the tools or skill. However, I’ve always drawn clothes and characters I wished to create. Now, with the use of a recently acquired 1990’s Brother knitting machine, I am finally getting a chance to produce these clothes and textile pieces. The image you see is a cat, Seymour, who roams my personal artwork frequently. He has become a staple and popular among people who enjoy my work. I’ve never had a pet myself but if I were to lose one like Seymour I imagine this is the type of flyer I would make. I stitched the edge of a flyer to the brick sweater with a bit of extra room to allow the large patch to curl on the edges and curl up at the bottom. Photo by Dennis Carroll
The United Stitches, artist Dong Kyu Kim My work is composed of everyday objects, such as paper receipts, tickets, package envelopes and shopping bags sewn together by hand. I use receipts saved from almost every purchase I have made since moving to the U.S in 2007. My process is inspired by JoGakBo, the traditional Korean craft of patching together scraps of fabric to make something useful. Just as JoGakBo gives life to discarded scraps, my artwork preserves my experiences through hand-stitching of everyday objects. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I experienced the radical reshaping of the South Korean economy, along with increasing globalization. I became obsessed with American culture and fashion, as well as the capitalistic ideals of money, fame, and success. My work explores the impact of American capitalism and neoliberalism on one’s values, and what motivates a person to want more. As an immigrant who has struggled over the years to ft in the new system, my work also examines my complex relationship to the United States and my search for the American Dream. Photo by Dong Kyu Kim
McMini, artist Hale Ekinci Collaging together fiber techniques, found textiles, and photographs from family archives, my work explores phases of acculturation, immigrant identity, and ideas about gendered labor. Decorative fringes are influenced by Turkish oya (lace edging on a headdress) and its use of symbolic patterns that serve as a secret language between women to express private, personal sentiments. Adopting these methods of embellishment and encoding, I create intercultural portraits framed with oya on floral bedsheets. The transferred images of people get repeated or turned into patterns themselves, to intertwine the “individual” into “collectives” that form multiple personalities. I then layer embroidery and painting to obscure their identities. The used domestic fabrics hold personal and bodily history invoking feelings of home and intimacy. By utilizing found materials and fiber crafts, I also question the value and worth assigned to materials and women’s work. The draped fabrics are framed with colorful crochet, where I crudely mimic traditional oya styles or devise new motifs like the “green card” edging reflecting my contemporary reality within the coding. Similarly, my use of Islamic ornamentation juxtaposed with portraiture is a subversive strategy. Seeming as mere beautification, ornamentation can actually trigger tension between the focal point and the motifs by teasing us in our vision’s periphery and overwhelm the figure it initially sets out to embellish. This echoes the different strategies of acculturation: integration, separation from, assimilation to, and social marginalization. Mimicking this ploy, the ornament and the figure perpetually displace each other as the core of identity and the other. Photo by Hale Ekinci
Moon River, artist Jay Rich This work explores sustainable fibers, their potentials and drawbacks in a woven structure with a simple sustainable organic indigo space dye process. This experimental weaving explores bast fibers, textures, indigo dye and silver leaf. Photo by Jay Rich
State, artist Jodi Hays I come from gardeners, teachers, believers, sinners, moon-lighting loggers, makers, milliners, cooks, healers, pharmacists, and grocers. I come from the American South, a place where the kitchen and pharmacy are the same room. In many ways, I see my work as that same room—an expansive space for building and coming together. Landscape and the material vocabulary of the American South influence my abstraction. Mining a southern povera, I use reclaimed textiles, fabric, and cardboard. These materials serve as stand-ins for expressive marks, and resourceful labor. In each of my works, I use reclaimed materials, dye and bleach, commenting on the invisible, inexhaustible and resourceful labor of women. The works are collage-based, evocative of the history of southern quilting and yet adapting the vocabulary for a vernacular in painting. State is loosely based on the rural county lines in small town maps of Arkansas. The boundaries serve to demark the landscape, and have a connection to materiality of paper and spray paint. Photo by Jodi Hays
Personal Safety Alarm Keychain Fob, from the series In Whose Defense?, artist Katrina Majkut In Whose Defense?, presents cross-stitched modern, mass-produced products and their packaging intended to stop violent and/or sexual assaults. The embroidered artworks use observational techniques and color theory to realistically cross-stitch the subjects to their actual size. They may also incorporate a found object within threaded product packaging to consider the object’s true nature and the culture that inspired it to be produced. From Weinstein to Cosby to R. Kelly to Bret Kavanaugh to Epstein, and #MeToo, from Trump’s pussy grabber locker-room talk to Devos cutting back sexual assault Title IX policies to underreported U.S. campus rapes, In Whose Defense? questions how contemporary culture is attempting to stop violent and sexual assaults on women, people of color, immigrants, and the queer community. Responding to other existing anti-assault movements, I am compelled to examine the physical efforts to stop violence as it happens. The series wants to raise questions such as: Do these products protect the predator or prey? Do they provide a sense of safety or perpetuate fear? Is it fair that these weapons put the responsibility to stop violence on the victim’s shoulders? And at what point is self-defense just the continuation of a culture of violence? Are they well-intentioned efforts or corporate greed capitalizing on an unhealthy culture, someone’s fear, or victimization? I want the series to provoke conversations about the responsibility to stop violence and the nature of existing efforts to curb it. Photo by Katrina Majkut
Circle Skirt in "Fliers" Handprinted Oilcloth, artist Kendra Benson Circle skirt with front pockets and side ties from the Padam Padam collection, inspired by the life of Edith Piaf. The print was adapted from Deco-era French pharmacy packaging, and altered to include headlines from Piaf’s life, then hand silk-screened onto linen oilcloth with black and metallic textile paint. Photo by Kendra Benson
All Consuming, artist Leslie Robison Knitting is a practice and a process. Knitting creates connection. As a line, yarn travels in, around, and through, creating points of contact with past actions. History is full of women, such as “Les Tricoteuses,” who knit as an active form of defiance and as a means of independence. Knitting is political. The knitting I perform pays homage to the strength of knitters past and present by replacing yarn with challenging fibers that make the act of knitting a performance of strength and endurance. The linear replacements for yarn bring their own associations to the finished product, heightening the political implications of this practice. rubber toy snakes and thread Photo by Leslie Robison
Cottagecorps 2.0, artist Margaret Hull My current body of work, Cottagecorps, includes installation, photographic documentation, and garments that contextualize the ongoing body of work, McCall’s 8616. I use McCall Pattern Company pattern number 8616 – the result of a 1983 licensing agreement with celebrity and model, Brooke Shields – as a template to assemble versions of the same blouse at various scales with a nod to the democratic nature of commercial garment patterns. The garments in this series are button down blouses worn on all parts of the body and sewn with floral chintz fabric. Through the layers of florals – the fabrics and the patchwork environment in which I locate the garments – I address the role of this textile both in European colonization in the late 17th century and the internet aesthetic, cottagecore; a movement that romanticizes western, agricultural life and harmony with nature. Cottagecorps, a homophone of cottagecore, references not only the commercialization of internet aesthetics but also the ease and speed at which trends spread in digital spaces and the potential for community-building online. I make garments using secondhand fabric sourced on Ebay, Facebook Marketplace, and Arts and Scraps in Detroit. Sourcing locally and secondhand is a priority in my practice because it supports individuals in my community and contributes to my understanding of place and people through material, in addition to lessening the environmental impact of the fashion and textile industries. Photo by Margaret Hull
Untitled (No. 7), from the series Precise Imprecisions, artist Michael James This work is one of a series of precisionist geometric constructions reconsidering formal and spatial counterforces. The execution process is focused, intimate and contemplative. Current digital interfaces (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Fresco, Procreate and digital textile printers) result in unique patterned fabrics that combine with a hundreds-year-old patchwork technique to coalesce as integrated and tension-filled compositions. Photo by Michael James
Reflections: View from the Bridge, artist Nancy Bryant Inspiration for this piece was derived from the artist’s hand dyed fabrics. The wave-like visual texture of the fabrics reminded me of rippling water as well as the reflections of light and shadow seen from the perspective of a bridge. Wind across the water creates the ripples while the light from the sun creates reflections. The resulting work is an abstract depiction of the interplay of natural elements. cotton fabrics, cotton batting, hand dyed with Procion dyes by the artist, machine pieced and machine quilted Photo by Nancy Bryant
Agency #1, artist Rosemary Meza-Des Plas Researching the history of women-led marches, I considered the role of the individual within a demonstration. Vast numbers of clamorous bodies in motion translate to a robust show of strength and determination; however, eventually, the individual goes home to their daily existence. When the protest is over, the pussy hats put away, signs disposed of and costumes packed up – is political activism embraced as an ongoing individual practice? Photo by Rosemary Meza-Des Plas
Blue Platte, artist Vicky Bedell The Platte River influenced this piece. From a birds-eye- view I wanted to show the sand bars with the river flowing around them. The browns represent the landscape and sand bars with rusted and hand hand-dyed fabric. The blues represent the river with hand hand-dyed cheesecloth and beading. Photo by Vicky Bedell