ARTnews, February 2008
‘Pricked:
Extreme Embroidery’
Museum of Arts & Design
Thtrough March 9
Here is an imaginative and broad-ranging sampling of the art of stitchery that, in most cases, defies conventional associations with pure hobby and women’s work. These many stitches in time secure memories, express passions, mark history, and punctuate ideas.
Stitchery here is not a comforting craft; rather, it is more a medium for translation, for amplifying meaning and ideas by estranging them from one mode of representation and then interpreting them in another.
British artist Simon Withers takes the medium into the realm of portraiture and war. His coarsely finished Afghan rug-style translates the folktales of an Iranian storyteller and hint at how the threads of the tales can get lost over time.
Carol Shinn takes off from photographs with her precise machine-embroidered images of torn armchairs and sharp shadows. The near-invisible-pointillism of the stitching creates a contradictory effect, appearing to stop time yet suggesting motion and dissolution.
Disarmingly, Nava Lubelski embroiders around what she calls “traces of accidents and mistakes,” stitching, for example, in red around wine spills and splatters on a yellow tablecloth. She gives dramatic substance to the unintentional and renders chance permanent. The results are strangely thought-provoking, painterly abstract compositions.
Less exciting in the context of this show are the more literal translations from paintings that characterize Laura Owen’s rather decorative tapestry and the by now familiar, albeit spectacularly stunning, embroideries of Angelo Filomeno.
The human figure gets surprisingly effective treatment: German artist Sybille Hotz embroidered two padded figures, one suspended from the other’s grip and both left faceless, their vulnerability underscored by dangling threads. Israeli artist Orly Cogan embroidered and offbeat, sexually provocative Garden of Eden scene, whereas Japanese artist Shizuko Kimura drew from life, with spontaneous gestures in thread.
Among the most inventive works is Ana de la Cueva’s Maquila (2007), a video accompanied by a pulsating sound track of Mexican and American music, describing a digitally directed machine embroidering a map in white outline with a red U.S.-Mexico border crossing,
These often prickly works jab at the conscience, the imagination, and even the funny bone. And they can be tough. Witness Maria Docter’s angry-girl takes on Statue of Liberty posters, emblazoned with “Don’t fuck with me I have PMS and I’m armed”.
—Barbara A. MacAdam