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View ProfilesPublished January 17, 2024 at 10:00 a.m. | Updated January 17, 2024 at 10:13 a.m.
The title of a new group show at the Phoenix in Waterbury is slightly misleading: "Warp & Weft" seems to suggest a display of fiber arts. In fact, it is that and much more. Along with woven works, there are paintings, prints, drawings and mixed-media collages. The seven artists take different approaches with a variety of materials, yet they have something ineffable in common. Let's call it savvy.
During a gallery visit, Phoenix owner and curator Joseph Pensak suggested that his selections all convey a strong sense of vertical (warp) and horizontal (weft) in composition or patterning. Moreover, he waxes philosophical in a curator's statement: "It seems clear as a society we are in an 'unweaving' era," it begins. "Institutions that once held solid ground and social sway are being torn apart, for good or ill."
It may be a stretch to ascribe sociological import to this exhibit, but it's not untoward to propose, as Pensak does, that "artists can show us the way." Or that art can "re-weave us."
Emma Warren hews most closely to the show's theme with actual weavings. Her chosen art form is both meditative and rigorous, qualities that she enhances with earthy hues and simple geometry. Warren's scroll-like "Untitled 4" is a 35-by-17-inch wool weaving held tautly in a suspended frame. Her other contributions to the show are more playful: three pairs of 12-by-9.5-inch ink sketches with matching color-block weavings that look like tiny rugs.
Jasmine Parsia employs weaving, too — with paper. An instructor at Burlington's Iskra Print Collective, she's a seasoned printmaker, but newspaper photographs, pencil line drawings and embossing turn up in her 11 pieces. Parsia's subtly embossed monotypes, particularly several on indigo-dyed paper, are like patches of sky or sea. An all-white square of paper holds three oblong shapes pressed into it like whispers.
Much livelier is the 12-by-15-inch monotype "Seeing Salt." Parsia layered woven strips of off-white paper and brushy swirls of black ink, creating fragments of checkerboard that confound the eye. The longer one looks, the more her abstract composition seems like an elusive dimension interrupted by visual static. Parsia roguishly crowns the piece with a strip of blue tape, a reminder of the artist's presence.
"These works were created in a circulatory way, merging techniques and imagery, repurposing to create something new," she explains in an artist statement. "A way of collaging a process."
Artist and writer Karen Cygnarowicz works with fiber, including on a loom, but many of her creations are marvels of hand-knotting. And though her website offers practical items such as macramé plant holders, much of the Montpelier artist's oeuvre is gloriously nonfunctional — except for the function of being sculpture. She writes that her practice "is in relationship to her experiences in nature, meditation and the mundane."
For the Phoenix exhibit, Pensak chose two Cygnarowicz works, and both make a statement. "The River Finds Its Way" consists of wool and cotton fiber strands in a range of blues that cascade from a valance near the ceiling and pool onto the floor. It is 125 inches of fiber-turned-flow.
Cygnarowicz's other wall-hung piece, titled "Between a Rock and a Soft Place," is a cement-gray construction 42 inches long. Its bottom is tightly knotted, forming a sort of basket; its long "arms," knotted in several patterns, are gathered at the top. The piece resembles a receptacle that is empty and perhaps unfillable. One does not expect a sense of void from cotton fiber, yet here we are.
Elise Whittemore and Carleen Zimbalatti both navigate the elemental parameters of geometry. As a printmaker, Grand Isle-based Whittemore writes in her statement, the practice "forces me to look at multiples, and think about why I use the same images over and over again." Her austere 24-by-20-inch monoprint "Met/Unmet" is almost a visual riddle: What would happen if you cut a white and a black sphere in two, then rearranged the pieces along an invisible axis so that they overlap? One answer, where the white and black forms meet, is gray; another is a multiplication of rounded shards.
Viewers might be reminded of a Venn diagram or a lunar eclipse. Either way, Whittemore's eloquent configuration manifests her idea that "shapes contain space and delineate boundaries." Metaphorically, she adds, shapes with boundaries can reference "ways of thinking about how we stand in the world, how we mark our territory, and how we think about the places we claim."
Montpelier-based Zimbalatti states that her work "is concerned with one of the most fundamental aspects of pictorial language: the line." But in her 26-inch-square acrylic-and-ink painting "Green Square and Orange Diamond," lines become geometric shapes that in turn form cogent relationships. Zimbalatti softened the rigid contours of the diamond by painstakingly adding row upon row of minuscule curved lines that mimic weaving.
As the title indicates, Zimbalatti does not eschew color. Her second painting here, the 29.5-inch-square "Iris," centers a large black sphere filled with an intricate web of white lines that, in this case, resembles crochet — as if a big, round doily were covering the black surface. The artist's irregular rendering of the lines gives the iris a sense of depth and barely perceptible movement. Orbiting this sphere are smaller balls in lilac and pale blue.
Zimbalatti's serene compositions achieve what she calls "a meditative quality toward fullness and transcendence."
In contrast to this graphic tranquility, Rachel Laundon's petite acrylic paintings on wood fairly burst with exuberance. Her mark-making repertoire of lines, dots and squiggles is delivered in lively colors and repetitive patterns. She typically corrals these into loose grids. But one 18-by-24-inch piece titled "Can You Dig It?" features a melee of marks, as if the grid had unexpectedly exploded.
Laundon, from Waterbury, is also known for crafting 3D fish sculptures and paintings of biomorphic forms she calls "soulscapes." She has an interest in fabric design, too, and it's not hard to visualize her latest works translated to, say, extroverted fashion.
Hannah Morris is a bit of an outlier in "Warp & Weft," though a welcome addition regardless. Her mixed-media collages are the only figurative works in the show, but her enigmatic narratives do have their own kind of push and pull. As she puts it in an artist statement, "My figures, buildings, animals and urban and wild landscapes are inherently off-kilter and awkward."
Morris ferrets out photos from vintage magazines, repurposing them in new scenarios. Then, using gouache paint, she creates a flattened plane and adds areas of color. At first glance her tableaux seem ordinary; upon closer inspection they are decidedly surreal. Sometimes her characters interact, such as the dancing couples in "Block Party"; in others, individuals are together but not really, like in an elevator when everyone faces forward and no one talks.
In her piece "Behind Schedule," a small crowd of people is milling about on a platform waiting for some kind of transport. Morris ignores the rules of scale; some of the people are preposterously larger than others. Perspective in the image pulls the eye toward the back, where a white double-decker bus looms at the left and a tall cityscape rises beyond it. The floor and ceiling of the platform are given complementary shades of turquoise and wine-red — pretty but unrealistic.
Morris' compositional facility and unique process make for visually arresting images, but their superpower might be psychological intrigue. "I hope the vulnerability revealed inspires the viewer to connect with what they see," the Barre artist writes in her statement. "I encourage the viewer to pause and enter into the visual space — to believe the absurd, the unlikely, the ambiguous — and then to construct their own personal narrative."
In "Warp & Weft," all seven artists contribute, as Pensak puts it, "their own thread to the fabric." That fabric is a multifaceted pleasure to behold.
"Warp & Weft," on view through March 29 at the Phoenix in Waterbury. thephoenixvt.com
The original print version of this article was headlined "Material Evidence | In "Warp & Weft," seven artists reveal process, pattern and playfulness"
Tags: Art Review, Warp & Weft, Emma Warren, Jasmine Parsia, Karen Cygnarowicz, Elise Whittemore, Carleen Zimbalatti, Rachel Laundon, Hannah Morris, The Phoenix
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