‘Tapestries’ at
JAYJAY
Modern digital technology meets traditional
craft in Magnolia Editions: Tapestries, an
amazing marriage of weft, warp and imagery. Thick,
painstakingly woven textiles have been utilized throughout
the ages; the Egyptians and Incas wrapped their dead
in them, the Greeks and Romans adorned their homes
with them, and later Europeans draped castle walls
with them. When the Jacquard loom was invented two
centuries ago, perforated cards were used to direct
the weavers to pull up or keep each warp or vertical
thread to create an image. Up to 36,000 cards could
be perforated for one tapestry, with each time-consuming
hole equating one stitch.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century, when artists
Donald Farnsworth and John Nava, working at the Oakland
art press Magnolia Editions, developed a method
replacing the time-consuming card weaving with digital technology. After capturing
contemporary artists’ works digitally, instructions are fed to the computers
in modern Jacquard looms that successfully and beautifully translate the detail,
nuance and palette of the original pieces into textiles. The tapestries here
were woven at a small family-run mill in Belgium of cotton, viscose, a cellulose-cotton
blend, or wool and viscose. And given some the artists
behind them-—Squeak Carnwath, Bruce Conner, Leon Golub, Mel Ramos,
Nancy Spero, William Wiley and Katherine
Westerhout-—they’re certainly not your typical rugs.
From afar, Golub’s large Reclining Youth offers an atmospheric
background with a watercolor like quality. Elsewhere, it appears the artist used
a heavier
hand with the “paint” that was absorbed quickly into the “canvas.” And
then there’s an effect that has to be attributed to the viscose in the
fabric, a shimmer that’s reminiscent of water’s reflective illusion.
But combined together, it’s all very curious, so much that you have to
step closer to get the nuances of color and then you can really see it’s
all woven into the canvas.
While Golub’s piece is painterly, Alan Magee’s pile of rocks in Cairnis
so realistic that, again, you just have to step closer to really see how the
artist did it. It is not a photo impression screened over the canvas, but rather
a woven image. Ramos’s Martini Miss, a voluptuous babe in his
trademark style, is not a surprise. What is, though, is how the loom picked up
the graduated shadow of the martini glass stem, and the light source reflecting
off the back
of the woman’s thigh. Spero’s Black and the Red III references
Egyptian antiquity with hieroglyphic figures marching across the panel through
chambers of light and dark and red. The loom picked up the essence of thousands
of years of aging that Spero offers, but with a rich depth born under that finely
honed computerization of weft and warp. The selection of works here highlighted
a range of artistic styles, each translated beautifully into textile and confirming
the
prescience and precision of Farnsworth and Nava’s union of old and new.
-—Saunthy Nicolson-Singh, April 2005
Magnolia Editions: Tapestries closed
in February at JAYJAY, Sacramento. Other artists in the Lia Cook, Lewis
deSoto,
Guy Diehl, Robert Dunahay, Donald Farnsworth, Era Farnsworth, Rupert
Garcia, Josph goldyne, Anthony Holdsworth, Robert Kushner, Hung Liu, John Nava,
Dan McCleary,
The Art Guys and Darren Waterston. |
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