Linked by their common use of embroidery, the 13 artists featured in Craft Contemporary’s exhibition “Strings of Desire” bring the beautiful intricacy of thread to life. It is imperative to see these works in person to appreciate the effect of threads, yarns and cloths used. Up close, their haptic quality is activated, and almost miniature worlds come alive before the viewer. As often happens to so-called “minor art forms” that take craft into consideration, the techniques of these practices can be recouped and focused in non-traditional directions, thus aligning themselves with anything else that is marginalized or placed in suspension. Not surprisingly many of the artists in the exhibition have used this hybrid aesthetic as a way of addressing their non-Western cultural heritages or their queer identities.

Ken Gun Min mixes oils, beads and crystals, with silk threads coated in drawing and embroidery wax to create a riotously lavish array of interlocking images. In Two Mothers (2022), a group of flowers flourishing like a tree are framed against a skyscape with a huge rainbow near the center. The ferment of abundance is physically palpable.

In a trio of wall hung works by Carmen Mardonez, the combination of balled up embroidered pillows and bedsheets turns into a soft molten mass. Leaning off the walls in red and light blue hues, the work pushes off of minimalism and into process works that historically utilized much harder industrial materials. There is a kind of exuberance in the allowance of chance that coaxes the informal into elegance.

The more formalized needlework visible in Jordan Nassar’s Where Mornings Go (2022) turns an overarching pattern and an insert of landscape-like fragments into an orderly choreography of hand embroidered cotton. Utilizing the traditional technique of Palestinian cross-stitch and referencing regional motifs in his embroidery, he revitalizes and resuscitates the past by bringing it into the present.

In the works of Sophia Narrett, scenarios often with erotic narratives flow from scene to scene as though some kind of thread bound thought balloon. In Mean (2016), composed of embroidery thread, fabric, and acrylic, there is a scene in which a man with an erection is standing outside of a window looking in, while nearby a partially undressed woman is kneeling as if in a yoga pose facing off in the distance. What’s going on inside the room is hard to understand but all of the activities outside seem to be about the difficulty of being in the world with others.

Ultimately the elements that binds these works together is their freedom to delineate whatever the artists are fascinated with and anchor that with the relative restrictions that embroidery can impose. The tactual corrals the conceptual and makes a viewer’s exploration of the different ideas embedded in these works all the more mesmerizing.