Fans of Los Angeles’ Craft Contemporary museum will enjoy Above & Below at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. The exhibition features twelve artists working in textile art, ranging from ethnic craft traditions to the wildly unconventional.
The show marks the Los Angeles debuts of Madame Moreau and Yveline Tropéa. Moreau anchors the traditional end of craft in the exhibition with Henry Christoph flag, a beaded ceremonial vodou banner depicting Haiti’s revolutionary war hero and king. Tropéa’s canvases too are covered in beading, illustrating abstracted people and creatures that suggest folklore influences. The French artist lives part-time in Burkina Faso where she has been influenced by Yoruba beading, and where she hires and trains women–disenfranchised kidnapping survivors of Boko Haram–as beaders. Similarly, Gil Yefman felted a bedspread size wall hanging in the show with Kuchinate, a craft collective of African women refugees in Israel.
Madame Moreau, Henry Christoph Flag, c. 2020. Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Photo by Gene Ogami.
Textile art has a long history of dovetailing with feminism, placing value in traditional “women’s work,” as exemplified by Elaine Reichek’s Sampler (A blurred region). Sabrina Gschwandtner likewise draws on this history to pay tribute to early motion picture film editors, largely women whose names are forgotten. Her Hands at Work (For Pat Ferrero) Diptych consists of 16mm film strips sewn into two quilt-like patterns mounted on lightboxes.
The current textile art renaissance is also dovetailing with the LGBTQ movement. Transgender artist Max Colby’s assemblages burst with camp, sprouting phallic shapes covered in beads, plastic flowers and Christmas ornaments. These works find their closest kin in the show in a beaded and studded punching bag, Cloudbuster, by Jeffrey Gibson, a queer Cherokee Choctaw artist. Conical metal beads known as jingles–which adorn the dress of pow-wow dancers–cover the lower half of Cloudbuster, tempting visitors to punch it and make it rain, at least sonically.
Jeffrey Gibson, Cloudbuster, 2013. Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Photo by Peter Mauney.
As well as beading, weaving is a prominent technique in Above & Below, with interpretations by Terri Friedman, Din Q. Lê, Anina Major, James Richards, and Frances Trombly. Friedman’s wall-sized tapestries particularly push the boundaries of weaving with riotous combinations of colors, textures, negative space, and hidden messages. One aptly says, “Alive.”
Above & Below
June 15-August 28, 2021
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