Monday, December 12, 2011

Fiber Futures in the city.


This weekend I was back in NYC to teach a workshop at the Japan Society, Nature's Inspiration: Embroidery Workshop, as part of the events supporting their current exhibit Fiber Futures.
It was a great workshop with a great group of ladies. We used nature as our inspiration to come up with interesting and cool works of embroidery. I will be teaching again in late January at the Textile Arts Center.

If you have not seen Fiber Futures you should. It is a lovely exhibit to walk through and see the vast array of mediums and techniques.


You were not allowed to take images in the gallery so these images are all pulled from their website but gives you a sense of the style of work- mostly more minimalist.

The press release states:
Fiber Futures: Japan's Textile Pioneers showcases the dynamic field of Japanese fiber art. Organized as a juried show jointly presented by Japan Society and International Textile Network Japan in collaboration with Tama University Art Museum, the works on display range from ethereal silk and hemp to paper pulp and synthetic fiber using methods that are sometimes deeply traditional, but sometimes employ the latest weaving and dyeing technology along with an environmentally conscious "green" ethos. Moving far beyond traditional utility, Japan's textile pioneers fuse past and present to create innovative, beautiful and sometimes challenging works of art.


I was a little disappointed with the installation as I had built my idea of the work up based on the images online and since the gallery has lower ceilings and is a series of small rooms I felt a number of the work felt like they needed more physical space to really be experienced to their best.
I also noticed some strange installation things, lack of attention to detail. This may have been due to the artist or the gallery but with such minimal and beautifully hand worked pieces of art every detail really needed to be perfect.



The show is only up until the end of the week and is very worth seeing. They also have a beautiful catalogue available.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

very disappointed. not sure of the adjectives i would use.
felt like a degre show at a textile/ fibre arts school.
definitely not up to the calibre i was hopeful for.

Joetta M. said...

I agree disappointing but I thought still worth seeing. It lacked a certain finesse that I expect in a professional exhibition. But I generally am less drawn to this style of work anyway.
I did recently learn that is was an open juried show as opposed to specifically curated which I found surprising.