COLLAGE ON VIEW
“Piecework”
at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City
1 March-21 April 2018
“Piecework” is a group exhibition featuring quilt-like collages by Vanessa German, Joe Lewis, Diane Samuels, Donna Sharrett and Stephen Sollins. Often adapting traditional techniques, the exhibition showcases works inspired by the history of quilt making. By using unexpected materials and addressing social and political realities, these works go beyond the canon, dissolving the line between art and craft and re-centreing the quilt as a symbol of American culture.
In a new series, “A Tailored Herbaria of At-Risk Forest Denizens”, Donna Sharrett collects fallen leaves to record the existence of trees imperiled by accelerated temperature, rainfall shifts, disease, insect introductions and landscaping trends. The resulting objects of sewn and quilted leaves are arranged to illuminate the uniqueness of each leaf and indicated with the tree’s GPS location. Similarly intricate is Diane Samuels‘ Poetry Quilt, a personal anthology of the artist’s favorite poems, precisely 198 of them, hand-transcribed in micro-script on collaged strips of painted paper. Delia Quilts by Vanessa German pays homage to the artist’s mother, a fibre artist, and to Delia, an African slave whose daguerreotype was taken in 1850 in Columbia, South Carolina. Her haunting image emerges from the tops of old quilts like a defiant, proud spirit. In a multi-part series of paper sculptures (three of which are on view), Stephen Sollins studies the odd shapes that make up a 19th century “crazy quilt” in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Part homage and part representation, these unusual quilts, made from envelopes and Tyvek, isolate each shape in a series of shifting arrangements. Joe Lewis’ Juvenile Body Bags made from Kente cloth, a royal and sacred West African woven textile, confronts the violence against black bodies/lives head on. Lewis writes that after death, no matter the circumstances, we should “wrap our loved ones in the cloth of Kings as they set out on their next journey.”
(adapted from the gallery’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Pavel Zoubok Gallery
531 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, New York 10001 USA
(212) 675-7490
Hours:
Tuesday-Friday, 10AM-6PM
Saturday, 11AM-6PM
Image: (top)
Juvenile Body Bag 2
by Joe Lewis
67″x36″
Kente cloth, plastic body bag, paper toe tags
2018
Image courtesy of the artist and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York
Image: (centre)
Delia Quilt 1
by Vanessa German
44″x30″
silkscreen on found quilt
2015
Image courtesy of the artist and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York