HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor
March 6–August 1, 2010 (Part I)
The National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY
The press release states:
For Native people, skin encompasses an entire universe of meaning. Our own skin functions as a canvas that we can inscribe with messages about our identity or use as a shield to protect and hide our secrets. As a material, animal skin or hide has had a long history within Native culture. It is a symbolic reminder of historical misrepresentation, exploitation, and racial politics. The artists selected for HIDE draw upon this subject in multi-faceted ways, using both the material and concept of skin as a metaphor for widespread issues surrounding identity and personal, historical, and environmental trauma and perseverance. In their work, they interrupt our understanding of race, distort our perception of “skin,” and breach the artificial boundaries created by this potent subject matter. Rather than hiding difficult issues, they expose what is beneath the surface.
Sounds fascinating, no?
In particular I would like to have seen the work of Nadia Myre. She has work on display from her work The scar project. A project in which Nadia works interactively with others in discussing issues of healing, wounds, and loss. The participants are invited to sew their scars into the provided canvases and reveal whether their scar could heal or not. The project is very poetic and to me very constructive for the individuals. I think that embroidery and sewing can be extremely cathartic and can heal emotional scars and trauma by its invitation to meditate on your thoughts. In this project Nadia invites her audience to experience that for themselves.
This inspired her next project the Forgiveness project. What would you want to be forgiven for?
Most of Nadia' work uses the scar both as a literal form and as a metaphor for issues within her culture, culture in general, media, & identity.
She not only works with sewing techniques but makes gorgeous beaded works as well.
Her projects are displayed in a very minimal way and seem to have a ton of back story to them. She is a very interesting artist and I will be curious to see more work from her.
She also creates some pretty powerful videos that you can watch here.
I hope that one of you can make it to the exhibit. There are a number of artists in the show and on the website utilizing fiber and fiber techniques. The museum is free so you can't beat that.
Here is a student, Maya, at my embroidery class at the Textile Arts Center. We had our last class yesterday and it was so exciting to see what my students had come up with and the places they were already going with their work. We focused the class on making work from a personal and autobiographical place... and they took the idea and ran with it.
Maya is making an incredible piece on a found linen dress, where there are "burn" holes in the back and text about political unrest in Peru on the front. The text is tiny and meticulously done, with her hand changing the color to reference the burning. Her plan is to make some pieces inspired by the stories that her father tells about his life in Peru during political unrest. I always admire political work and Maya truly has the sensibility to make some powerful stuff so I cannot wait to see what she does next and how these projects turn out.
By far my most prolific student was the super sweet and lovely poet Jill Magi. She came to the class brimming with ideas and enthusiasm and on a teachers schedule she was able to delve right into them during the month of classes. I loved her first pieces where she ran pages of text through her printer and then embroidered gorgeous areas and designs of color. As an experiment it showed a ton of potential in this process and helped teach her the stitches.
She also started to play with some simple line drawing works. Jill was so inspired as a word smith to get her work out in this new form and I honestly think she will make some great things as a result. She has played with making her poetry visual before- you can see some work at her website here.
This is the back of my work that I am currently working on. 
I want, I want, I want.
The incredible and a little off-putting stitched portraits of Scott Ellegood.
Scott creates high contrast, pixelated portraits of men on a dark black background- making the colors and face move forward in space and leaving a lot of ambiguity on the context of the male. A bit foreboding, very unspecific, and yet vulnerable and lost...
Scott states:The embroidered portraits are an attempt to examine how we see ourselves and how we see other people.
We all approach other people with a predetermined set of historical and cultural expectations. Expectations are placed upon new acquaintances, strangers on the street, and even onto our most intimate friends.
We also create our own masks. We attempt to “be seen” in a certain way. We may wish to be noticed, or to blend into the background; whether consciously or through some internal defense mechanism...
As part of the design process, images are digitally manipulated to a point (or past a point), in which they no longer resemble the original “model". I attempt to create an “every-man", in which many different people can be seen in one image.
His erasure of the individual into an "every man" is very successful in my opinion and says something about out culture and the experience of being a human in the digital age. I do wonder why he chooses embroidery as a medium and how he began to use it.
I am loving the stitched work of Lithuanian artist Inga Liksaite. Her works are large scale stitched works on black fabric and super beautiful.
Some detail shots give you a sense of how the works are built up by simple stitching and the images develop from the closeness of the lines.
I really enjoy these 2 triptychs- the use of the white space and the landscape of the portrait. I get very excited by the above image and how the texture of the hair changes from one panel to the next. I wonder how her working process made her decide to make that choice- as it really pushes the work further.
I wish I knew more about her work and her process and so wish I could see this work in person.
See more of Inga's work here.
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