Artwork Spotlight: Dress Tents, Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao

#MondayArtworkSpotlight: Today we’re highlighting another fantastic group of artworks in Inside Out: Seeing Through Clothing: “Dress Tents,” a series of wearable architecture installations and photographs created by Bay Area artists Robin Lasser (@rjlasser) and Adrienne Pao (@adriennepao).

Since 2005, Lasser + Pao have designed their large-scale Dress Tents in response to different geographical and cultural contexts, from the hula culture of Hawaii to the military history of Russia. Each site-specific work features a female performer occupying the top part of the dress, while visitors and participants can enter the lower tent portion, which often contains music, images, or other forms of storytelling that offer a more intimate and interactive understanding of place.

Dress Tents on display in Inside Out:

• Ms. Yekaterinburg: Camera Obscura Dress Tent, Church on the Blood, Yekaterinburg, Russia, 2011

• Hula Girl Dress Tent, Waikiki, Oahu, 2017

• Sari Dress Tent, City Hall, San Francisco, 2018 (exterior view)

• Sari Dress Tent, City Hall, San Francisco, 2018 (interior view)

Artist Spotlight: Kira Dominguez Hultgren

Kira Dominguez Hultgren is a Bay Area-based textile Artist who currently has a solo exhibition at San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, entitled I was India: Embroidering Exoticism. Kira is a recent graduate of California College of the Arts, earning a dual degree MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies. Dominguez Hultgren is represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, and she is a Graduate Fellow at The Headlands Center for the Arts where she is preparing for upcoming shows at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek and the de Young Fine Art Museum of San Francisco. 

What are materials and processes utilized in your body of work?

I primarily work on floor looms, backstrap looms, Mapuche looms, and looms created from tensioning yarn between any two or more fixed points (chairs, bedframes, flag poles, walls, etc.). I use my studio practice to materialize my research, whether that be photographic documentation of textile archives or my own family textile archives and history. I weave in response to weavings. Weaving tells, speaks, and awaits a response. I consider weaving as manifesting and responding to material culture.Silk from India and wool from North and South America are my primary materials with which I weave; and found wood, PVC pipes, metal anchors, and zip ties are my primary materials that I use to construct the loom in the gallery. Silk and wool allow me to confuse a metonym (symbol) for North American Indigenous identity (geometric woven patterning in wool) with a material like silk, which is often read as synonymous with Asia.  The found materials I use to construct the loom question the physical and cultural architecture with which we encounter these woven fabrics. How are these textiles bound in words, spaces, places, and global infrastructures from which they cannot break free? 

 Describe the main differences of your 'old' studio to your 'Shelter in Place' studio.

The biggest difference between my studio at the Headlands Center for the Arts and my shelter-in-place studio is my children! Rather than living the Woolfian ideal of "a room of one's own," i.e. my studio at the Headlands, I have now been plunged headlong into an ever-changing circus theater where living room becomes studio space becomes middle-school classroom. Bedrooms become practice spaces become never-ending Zoom meetings. Even if my looms are still blissfully my own, to step into them requires an active turning-away from the dishes piling up in the sink, an active stepping over the piles of books and papers strewn over the couch. But then I stand at my loom and breathe, my kids rushing by with laptops and headphones in hand to their next in-place activity, and my fingers remember other rhythms. The rhythms of weavers who stood at their looms, pressing on warp strands, picking up patterns, and I'll trust those ancient rhythms to carry me through this season: to create even while I'm standing in-place.

What drew you to the fiber art medium over others?

Weaving is about storytelling through material and structure. Rather than creating a linear narrative, the act of weaving leaves in its wake a web of creative deconstruction that is never a finished statement.  Just think of Penelope waiting for Odysseus, unweaving by night what she wove in the day. Even without the weaver’s hand, my materials – wool, zip ties, tubing, coaxial cables – are working against one another, actively deconstructing what appears as narrative continuity when a fabric is pulled from the loom. Weaving, as it tells, compels some material to sink to the bottom, while other material rises to the surface. Some strands act only as a support, while other strands steals the spotlight. To weave with competing unequal materials is to reflect a lived experience of ongoing U.S. colonialism supported by unequal histories.  Some histories go unheard, unseen, while other histories seemingly become the whole story. I want to tell those histories which need to be heard, but have yet to be said: stories from weavers such as Juanita (Asdzáá Tl'ógí, Navajo, 1845-1910); or stories of living between races when miscegenation was a crime such as my grandmother’s story of growing up Hawaiian, Black, Indian, and White.

What artist, who works in a different medium, informs your practice?

Faith Ringgold (b. 1930) is an African-American painter and sculptor who often uses quilting as a framing device for her work. I am drawn to her practice for many reasons, one of which is her fluidity between mediums, often using textiles as the last step in her process. Through quilting her painted canvases, she turns visualized narratives of the Black experience in Harlem for instance, into materialized evidence that can be handed-down to the next generation. Her American People Series has been a huge influence on my work, where she shows how the symbol of the U.S. Flag is not neutral. In Ringgold's paintings, the flag racializes bodies, buries those bodies, and yet is only made visible through the blood of those bodies.

What are you looking forward to doing again once Shelter in Place is over?

I'm looking forward to running into people again, literally! I never appreciated how much I like to bump shoulders in doorways, brush hands when picking over produce at the grocery store, or grab onto arms to steady myself, when I crash headlong into a fellow artist, both of us absentmindedly turning a corner in the Headlands studios. Although I'm not particularly extroverted, I am very tactile, and I miss connecting with people through casual, spontaneous touch!

Artwork Spotlight: Kate Mitchell, Terrain

#MondayArtworkSpotlight: Today we’re spotlighting TERRAIN (2015-2016) by Bay Area artist and choreographer Kate Mitchell (@katemitchell9259).

This installation features several costumes originally worn in a fashion and dance performance of the same name, which premiered at ODC Theater in San Francisco on November 18, 2016. Inspired by the new terrain of her aging body, Mitchell created intricately textured costumes that recall natural textures and forms, from the ridges of sand on a shore to the rivulets of rushing water.

Paired with photographer Alessandra Mello’s abstracted images of the artist’s body, these costumes connect the patterns and textures of the female form to the natural terrain surrounding all of us. For Mitchell, “These projects have been part of my desire to find a clearer understanding of what is outside of women, to come to a sense of the strength and beauty of what is inside us, and to express those discoveries—as unresolved as they still may be—with fabrics, photographs, words, and dance, all interwoven together.” #MuseumFromHome #SmallMuseumBigLove #sjmqt #textiles #fiberart

Artist Spotlight: Tricia Royal

Tricia Royal was the Artist in Residence at San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles in the Fall of 2019. During her residency the SJMQT staff would joke that Tricia’s work was an antidote to a gloomy day. Whenever we needed to brighten our moods, we’d visit the AIR hallway and see her bright, neon colors in classic quilt patterns and suddenly feel uplifted and reinvigorated. Hope this does the same for you!

What are materials and processes utilized in your body of work?

I am primarily a quiltmaker.  I make art quilts that nod to the canon of traditional quilts and feature my own hand-printed and hand-painted fabrics.  I have also experimented with paper the last several years and have been making a series of sewn paper quilt collages whose tessellated structure nods to traditional patchwork and quilting.

I see mark-making as an expressive, transformative act, a way to claim, reframe, and elevate a previously blank or found textile or scrap of paper.  I approach the application of hand-applied geometric surface patterns on fabric or paper in a layered, iterative, and experimental manner, viscerally enjoying the inherent flow, and sense of surprise, serendipity and play.  What this means in practice is that I like to sling a lot of paint around in my studio, in a mostly uncontrolled way, with lots of splattering and layering of different techniques, and revel in the wildness and improvisationality of it all.  What might happen if I use this color or that technique together? Let’s find out! It’s just paper, fabric, and paint, after all!

I like to use secondhand, found or community-sourced/discarded textiles and papers in my work as much as possible.  This creates a community-art based dimension to my work; I am having a curatorial conversation with and about the society in which I am a part, via the sorting, selecting and usage of the discards and detritus of my local and global neighborhood.  I believe that used textiles retain value in our throwaway society. What is “useless” transforms into a valuable resource. By using these materials as the basis of my art, I hope to challenge and change minds about commonly accepted notions regarding the value of items in our material culture.

 Describe the main differences of your 'old' studio to your 'Shelter in Place' studio.

My “old” studio and “shelter-in-place” studio are one in the same: I currently work in my home studio, a light-filled sunroom addition off the back of my house in Los Angeles.  I also use the back half of my garage as a wet studio, where I produce the fabrics I use in my quilt work via various hand painting and printing techniques like splatter painting, relief printing, screenprinting, and monoprinting.

 What are you currently reading/listening to?

Podcasts are the soundtrack to my art practice. I am and have been a big podcast junkie, and tend to listen to podcasts that focus on current events, politics, history, science, and medicine. My favorite podcasts lately have been The Daily Beans, This Podcast Will Kill You, The Episodic Table of Elements, History of the 90s, You’re Wrong About, Ologies, Sawbones, Science Vs., and Stay Tuned With Preet.

What advice would you give to other creatives at this moment in time?

Be gentle with yourself right now. A lot of my artist friends are overwhelmed and in shock given all that’s been happening right now (with illness and loss of jobs) and don’t feel like making art, or just physically or mentally cannot right now.  Things are incredibly surreal, deeply weird and uncertain. Everyone I know is coping with this pandemic and its repercussions differently. Your first order of business is to just keep yourself afloat, whatever that means in your life. If you’re able to manage to do more, great.  But this is not a competition, folks! Try not to get swept up by what my artist friend Nora Renick-Rinehart calls “performative quarantining”.

That said, keeping a routine and staying productive has been helping me with fear and uncertainty I have been feeling.  Concentrating on my work lets my mind relax, puts me in “the zone”, and in turn, tamps down my anxiety. This was true before the pandemic, and it seems to be getting me through my days right now as well.

What drew you to the fiber art medium over others?

Fibers and fabrics have been a constant in my life, since childhood; I learned to sew when I was 11 and have never stopped.  At this point it is the medium that feels the most natural, the medium over which I have the most control due to years of experience and practice.

Fibers are a constant in all of our lives, with us from the cradle to the grave, and have long been the medium to which women were restricted; my feminist leanings have cleaved me to this medium as well.  I feel really strongly about textiles and fiber art and fiber artists being taken seriously as artists and as an art form, as legitimate as paint or sculpture. There’s a sense of defiance in me, a demand that fiber work not be sidelined.

What artist, who works in a different medium, informs your practice?

Sigrid Calon is a Dutch visual artist whose risograph print work I really love: her work is incredibly graphic, geometric, and intensely colorful.  She uses a lot of really intense hues, including neons! I also use a lot of neon in my own prints, so her work is like catnip to me!

Words and type also mean a lot to me; I have a lot of letterpress art in my personal art collection, and I want to start working words into my fiber work more going forward. Kennedy Prints (Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.) is a letterpress artist I really admire; he uses humor, bold type, bright colors to make statements about politics and race.

What non-art related activity do you do to invigorate your body/mind?

Before the Stay-At-Home order, I made a point to take barre and Pilates classes at least three times a week.  I find that getting a little exercise is very clarifying for my mind and body. After the Stay-At-Home order came down, I downloaded a yoga app called Down Dog (which is free until at least May), and most days I try to take about a half hour to do some gentle yoga stretches.  As the weeks go on, I hope to ramp up my yoga practice and want to make a point to get out for more walks in my neighborhood (6 feet away from everyone else, of course!).

What is your favorite place to look at art work on the web? In person?

I am a huge Pinterest and Instagram user, so I would say I turn to both of those to discover interesting (new-to-me) artists and art.

What are you looking forward to doing again once Shelter in Place is over?

Things I used to take for granted before, like casually going to the grocery store.  I am looking forward to going out for a meal at a local restaurant (any that survive this crazy time) with my husband and daughter.  Mundane, everyday things, honestly.

What is your favorite afternoon snack?

My mid-afternoon ritual, for as many years as I can remember, is a big mug of piping hot black tea with a splash of milk and turbinado sugar. I usually pair the tea with a treat from the pantry, like a small bowl of popcorn, a bowl of grapes, or a small cookie.

Anything else you would like to say or mention?

This pandemic will likely change our world in a myriad of ways, ways we cannot even fathom right now, both good and bad.  Our lives will be forever changed. We have a chance to use this painful, clarifying experience to change our world for the better.  We have to demand better: better leaders, better preparedness, a better, safer, kinder world for all of us.

Artwork Spotlight: Laura Raboff, Cricula

#MondayArtworkSpotlight: Laura Raboff’s (@lauraredshoes) Cricula installation in "Inside Out: Seeing Through Clothing."

Clothing imagery has long been a part of Berkeley-based artist Laura Raboff’s work, although her use of natural materials in Cricula signals an exciting new direction in her practice. The lacey, golden material of this installation is composed of cricula, a kind of silkworm cocoon harvested from cashew trees in Indonesia.

The difficult and delicate process of creating each dress involved cleaning each individual cocoon, ironing them flat, and then stitching them together with gold thread into lightweight, dress-like forms. Each dress is carefully constructed to allow light to filter through and shadows to intertwine with the light.

According to the artist, these works evoke unspoken memory, and a layering and synthesizing of complicated feelings that are sometimes at odds with each other.