I went to the opening of Interpretations at the Visions Art Museum here in San Diego last weekend, but between negotiating between hungry/cranky teens, the number of people there, and my own exhaustion, I didn’t really feel like I had seen the show. I didn’t have the time and space to really look at the pieces, plus I didn’t write anything down about pieces, which made it hard to make a concrete review possible.
So I went back today. Today is a school holiday, but grades are due Monday, so I spent a lot of the day dealing with that and ferrying girlchild around, but my mom hadn’t seen the show either, so we headed out there around lunchtime. No pictures are allowed in the gallery…I have this one of the door…
That IS exciting! If you’re one of the artists featured below and you’d like me to add a picture of your piece to this post, let me know and I’ll either steal it (with your permission) off your website, or you can send me a picture…I’m all about advertising for you!
One thing I like about this show is that it has a nice variety of types of quilt art, from bright to earth tones, from abstract to figurative to decorative. There was nothing particularly realistic…even the few photo pieces were altered or zoomed in enough that they became more abstracts than anything else. There was a lot of dense quilting and hand-stitching and markmaking on fabric. There was a lot to look at…of course, part of that is having 30+ artists in the show, rather than a more concentrated focus on 2 or 3 artists, when you get to see the depth of a person’s work.
As I mentioned before, in the past, all the works were on the website, but this time, there are just a few, so I will find artists’ websites when I can.
As you come into the exhibit, Alicia Merrett’s Mapping Earth is a bright spot on the wall. She has recently started making what she calls textile maps, which look like views from the sky of the patterns of roads and fields on the earth, but it’s really her use of color that makes this piece sing. You can see it on her website under the exhibitions tab.
Vicki L. Carlson’s piece Worlds Apart is also going to be in the Art Quilt Elements exhibit, so here’s your chance to see it before it wanders off to the East Coast. It’s an interesting piece that has been dyed in overlapping circles of color. I can’t find a website for her, but her piece is currently on the main Interpretations page linked above. I actually like it better from a distance, as it looks like the overlaps are more sheer and multilayered; close up you can see that it’s all one layer.
Betty Busby’s piece Plexus reminds me of lizard skin in 4 parts. I don’t like this piece as much as her other work, but it’s still fascinating to look at, because of her skillful use of shading to make the piece three-dimensional. You can see Plexus if you scroll down the Macros page here…along with some other fascinating pieces. Even more interesting is her blog, where she talks about some of her techniques and how she works. I’m always fascinated by the artist’s mind and process.
Lisa Kijak’s Neon Schwinn Bicycle caught my eye. Her blog tells the story of the unlit neon signs that she is reproducing in fabric. This one is from the Safety Cycle Bike Shop in Los Angeles and is shown on her blog.
Pamela Allen has a piece in the show called Fishing Derby, Mesopotamia 1200 BC, which just made my daughter sing this song (while bouncing up and down in front of the quilt).
(They Might Be Giants singing The Mesopotamians, which she learned in school, of course)
I always like Allen’s work; this one has some great sky quilting and a tassel for a horse’s tail. If you scroll down on this page, you will see it.
Judith Plotner’s piece Sunset II has some interesting hand-stitching in it that really makes the piece. When I went to find a webpage for Judith, Google got all violent with me and said her site might contain malware of some sort. I guess I’m paranoid, because I didn’t keep going. You can see a few of her pieces here, on the Surface Design webpage. If you know Judith, you might tell her to Google her webpage and try to make sense of their warning.
In Peggy A. Brown’s piece, Another Form I, the black lines criss-crossing the piece add interest and focus to the piece. As with Plotner’s piece, I try to imagine the work without that one element (the handstitching or the black lines), and it really emphasizes how important something as simple as a few lines or stitches might be. Brown is a watercolor artist who translates her watercolor work into fabric.
Jeanne M. Marklin’s piece Grief does an amazing job of translating that feeling into fabric. There’s the sense of drowning and falling down and inky darkness and spots of light. You can see it on her blog here. There is no explanation of the piece on the blog, although she talks about learning shibori.
My biggest problem with writing this post (besides no pictures) is that I’ve added about 5 blogs to my reader…like I need MORE.
Paula Kovarik’s quilt Pundit is stark and graphic, but the best part is the finger sticking up into the air seems to affect the quilting lines. It was not a surprise to me then to see on her website that quilting is a significant element in her work AND that she is a graphic designer. Both are obvious in this work, which is on her blog here.
Gillian Moss’ work Second Chance, which can be seen on the Interpretations website here, utilizes a variety of non-standard quilting fabrics (some wool, sparkly bits, batik, and leather) that don’t seem like they would go together to make this simple but beautiful piece. She uses hand- and machine-stitching to attach the pieces and emphasize their shapes, but the key is the recycling of fabrics that already WERE something…I swear that green wool plaid came out of my stash. I had a skirt in progress in that fabric from my teen years…seriously.
I was pleased to see Shelley Brenner Baird, a co-conspirator in Sightlines, at the opening; she had traveled from Ohio for better weather (whoops, sorry), but her piece Plot caught my eye with its tight quilting and markmaking reminiscent of peeling paint and graffiti. You can see it on her website here (or below, with her permission). It’s hard to get a sense of its size and presence on the web; it plays much better hanging on a wall.
Continuing with the Sightlines connection, across from Shelley’s piece was Virginia Spiegel’s Boundary Waters 51. I thought I had never seen one of her pieces up close and personal, only on the web, and the detailed stitching was amazing. There is a definite sense of movement from all the color and stitching. You can see it here. Of course, I HAD seen another of her pieces (seriously, I’m still not remembering…must have been in another mindframe)…Boundary Waters 50 is in Creative Force with my piece Lost. I seriously can’t even visualize it at the moment…strange how the brain edits experience. I am sitting here with my eyes closed, trying to imagine the exhibit, which I saw in Houston AND Long Beach. Sigh. The boychild asked me the other day about where he got his memory ability from…I am very good at photographic-type memory stuff, remembering where I saw something on a page, but not always with remembering tasks (that’s what a calendar and an iPhone are for)…so this is really bugging me. I really can see a pretty good facsimile of the show in my head, and it’s not there. Sorry, Virginia.
Marianne Burr was at the opening. If she caught you looking at her piece, she handed you her card, which I found amusing. Her piece In the Desert combines a graphic design of gear shapes with hand-stitching, in her characteristic style. I’m a sucker for graphic work, so this fits. Her website has many example of her work, although I don’t see this piece.
Sandra Poteet’s piece Monochrome I: Deep Inky caught the boychild’s eye, presumably because it was mostly black, but way down in the gray flat areas at the bottom (because most of it is textured), are a couple of divers, an octopus, and some fish stitched out in a thin black line. She calls this type of piece a “Schrunchie,” based on what she does to the fabric…if you scroll down a bit, Deep Inky is on this page.
Lori Lupe Pelish’s piece Something, Nothing, Everything is a beautiful triptych. I’ve always liked how she takes the tiny calicoes and Civil-War-type fabrics and meshes them together to make her portraits. Each of the figures in the three small quilts looks like they’re thinking…about something, nothing, everything. I could not find a picture of this piece on the web, which is unfortunate, because it’s truly wonderful.
I didn’t take notes on all the quilts. My mom liked stuff that didn’t interest me…she loved the Caryl Bryer Fallert piece that didn’t rock my boat. I believe it’s this piece, Chromatic Feathers #1. That’s why you should always go to art exhibits with other people…they make you stop and look at the stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily stop for…I did not realize how freakin’ TINY her zigzag was…I don’t think I ever stitch that small…plus mom pointed out the hand-dyes. There were a few others like that which didn’t make it into my notes, so don’t feel bad if I didn’t mention you…I had limited time (and girlchild was calling and texting me while I was gone).
The show is up until January, so if you’re in town, you might want to check it out…it does have a nice variety of pieces. With that, I should try to run some of my multitude of errands, eh? Whatever. I really want to hole up in here and make art until April (must have something to do with the rainy weather and lack of teenagers).
Kathy Nida 