Transpositions
Marisa Gallemit, Emily Hermant, Tong Zhou Lafrance, and Caroline Monnet
October 14 – November 26, 2022
Transpositions is the final in a three-part series of exhibitions that explore connections between textiles and technology. Building on the preceding exhibitions Interweavings and Remediations, the artists selected for Transpositions offer an expanded understanding of textile construction. Using non-traditional media such as wire, rubber, photographs, or insulation they transpose the technologies of weaving or braiding onto their chosen materials.
In genetics, ‘transposition’ refers to the transfer of a segment of DNA from one genomic site to another. In music, it refers to copying over a piece of music into a higher or lower key. The process of transferring sets of information inherently contains the potential for variations, glitches and the creation of new meanings. Works by artists Marisa Gallemit, Emily Hermant, Tong Zhou Lafrance, and Caroline Monnet activate this potential through processes of transformation and reconfiguration. Here, the knowledge of specific textile processes and aesthetics are brought into dialogue with materials that contain their own cultural and historical significance.
Just as weaving and braiding can be considered forms of technology, in these artists’ hands, the unique properties of each material shape the way that the manipulation of various ‘threads’ take form. Materials always bring with them their own historical baggage, speaking to legacies of (mis)use, networks of circulation, and the transmission of geographically and culturally situated knowledge. Together, these works reflect and expand upon traditional categories of craft, skill, and making by transposing new meanings onto everyday materials and contexts.
Image: Emily Hermant, Way Broken Twill (from the series Fragments From A Larger Whole), 2019. Collected and stripped telecommunications cables on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.
“In Craft Hard Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies for Craftivism, Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch provide a brief international survey of activities which seek to deploy craft for the purposes of protest. Knitting, and other textile arts traditionally associated with communal crafting, plays the leading role. The concept of the ‘revolutionary knitting circle’ recalls the 1970s feminist use of a similar group exchange as a form of consciousness raising. Black and Burisch also cite the AIDS Quilt project of the 1980s as an important precursor for the present moment. So much for precedents, what about the future? Clearly, efficacy and identity are interwoven in this essay, which takes for granted another 70s concept–that the personal is political–and offers real-world strategies for [maintaining] the efficacy of symbolic craft. It is too early to say whether craftivism will have staying power in the cultural imagination, like the Arts and Crafts, studio and countercultural craft movements before it. But there is little doubt that Black, Burisch and their peers have breathed new life into this old set of ideas.”
Nicole Burisch 