Thursday, March 11, 2010

Depth of Surface: A Review

Depth of Surface is an exhibition of the textile and texture based work of 16 artists currently on display at the SF State Fine Arts Gallery. Exceptionally varied in material and concept, the show was well crafted. As an artist who works increasingly with programming and digital media, I found it refreshing and pleasurable to examine these physical objects of such tactile presence. Textiles are a source of powerful metaphors: the threads of our lives, of meaning, of thought.

Rock Wall by Jennifer Ferre, a tapestry of cassette tape appealed to me because it is woven information. Music is certainly a fabric in my life, I wondered what songs were on the tape. An ex's mix? Cassette tapes are artifacts, this one was remixed.

Julie Chang's hanging scrolls of wall paper-esque prints were vivid and a little absurd. I had forgotten how nice it is to compose prints, juxtaposing graphics like plants and floor plans in saturated colors. As wall paper, it suggests that I think more about the images that make up our social and domestic environments.



Dustin Fosnot had made a cyanotype (a sun print) of his body on a discarded mattress. Mattress Reminded me how textiles are part of our lives, and of the imprints we leave on the city.
Katie Lewis's Intermittent Transmission was coded language: lines of tangled thread arranged like blocks of text on the wall. I thought, if it was text, would I read it? Would I feel it? The arrangement made me think of compressing language into writing by a codec other than letters.

Ali Naschke-Messing seemed to be working with the thread-as-language metaphor with The Art of Storytelling: Ode to Benjamin I appreciated the delicate, tangled, ephemeral feel of the words.

Ironing: Mulit-Terrain Pattern by Mung Lar Lam, as a wall-size fabric installation was a nice contrast of scale to the other pieces. It recalled color fields and some kind of saw-tooth topography. There's a whole genre of art that is showing the subtle beauty of the everyday like the patterned creases made by ironing.

Depth of Surface will be up until March 25th.


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