Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
This body of work is based on the material and poetic properties of leather clothing salvaged from thrift stores, or handed down by family and fellow artists. I take the clothing apart along seam lines, and use methods of domestic sewing and self-taught tailoring to insert the pattern pieces in new configurations into canvas grounds. Machine-stitched seams in the canvas function as elements of drawing; hand stitches are, for me, like punctuations of time. I'm building images; the works speak some of the language of painting but are conceived and constructed as objects, and they are as tactile as they are visual.
The quantity of used leather clothing is fathomless, and of increasingly low value. I think of the complexities of the distant supply chains to our needs and wants, and try to reconcile the rapid cycles of consumption and waste with the meaning and necessity of hand labor. I think about the care and maintenance associated with traditional sewing skills, and my use of it to destruct function.
I’m drawn to the material because it is so charged with its own histories. Each garment is an article of fashion identity, disowned, and an animal hide, relic of animal life. It’s all at once a body surrogate, a memento mori, and a mass-produced consumer product. To me, its remnants bear traces of all these lives. The pattern shapes are reflections of feminine personality and form, and of irretrievable loss, animated by the possibilities of renewal.