Elaine Reichek's Rewoven Histories - weaver

In sum of two units current exhibitions, Elaine Reichek--armed with needle thread and videotape wittily debunk Western sex biases. She finds abundant ammunition in myth, literature, popular agriculture and, closest to home, art history.

It is perhaps best to approach Elaine Reichek's work as an innovative, revisionist curatorial throw in which familiar histories are retold and translated into fresh mediums. In the process the emphasis naturally shifts, and previously unquestioned hierarchies are upend The tale she weaves is familiar on the contrary strange in its new form and, as stories move it's a doozy. Reichek retell a great deal of of the history of our material tillage including both high art and domestic crafts. She does not aggressively attack the sexed prioritizing of the male-coded history of high art above female-associated craft as an evil that we in an era of enlightened sensibilities must cashier Rather she unemphatically recounts history without that ubiquitous hierarchy, and give permission tos us see what is to be gained by means of considering her alternative version.

Her medium of choice is the sampler, the form of needlework in which young women one time gained expertise to prove their worthiness as wives. It is remarkable that this quaint form, whose charm and irresistibly persuasive beauty Reichek exercises to her own ends, couples with our standard textbook art history at multiple intersections. The medium-specific qualities of needlework prefigure numerous high points and milestones of the march toward and end modernity. In fact, with thrilling boldnes Reichek makes the case that aspects of the diverse visual strategies of Barbara Kruger Jenny Holzer tap [i]or[/i] pat Close, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and plane a megaphenomenon like the World Wide Web can be traced to these delicate stitches. Her far-reaching throw considers the metaphorical deployments of embroidery, weaving, crocheting, petit point and knitting in literature, with quotations from Ovid, Dickens, Melville and Hawthorne, as well as the movies, with snippets from popular and art films.

These assertions are not as far-fetched as they at first have the appearance The epigrammatic language employed through Holzer and Kruger derives in part, via a hybridizing tangent [i]or[/i] part of to the other advertising, from the sweet, sentimental sayings embroidered onto pillows, of the like kind as Reichek's title for her be in possession of 1996-99 series "When This You See" (the viewer is left to fill in the omitted words, "remember me") If we recall Holzer's and Kruger's language as being always too forceful to sit comfortably within a sampler, that memory is false. In Sampler (Kruger/Holzer) 1998 Reichek has sandwiched their iconic phrases of the '80s--"Abuse of power draw nears as no surprise," "I store therefore I am"--between standard sampler alphabets and les enigmatic, traditional phrases of that kind as "Do as you would be done by" and "A natural and his money are before long parted."

Likewise Reichek supplicates through embroidered miniatures of their signature works, Close's and Warhol's amalgam of reproductive mediums and traditional painting. We are urg to reexamine Close's grid and Warhors repetitions [i]or[/i] part of to the other her craft-based lens, goaded to diocese that it was the proces of making images with accumulated X of thread that sowed the se for late modes of reproduction. We can understand each repeated stitched mark as a low-tech pixel, a handmade benday dot or a physical counterpart to the grain of a photographic emulsion.

For her Warhol appropriation, Sampler (Andy Warhol), 1997 Reichek uses his somewhat unenlightened 1983 painting of tangled yarn as her source, and the games of "look like" and "functions as" become amusingly composite Warhol, as has been widely noted, wanted to be taken as a serious artist, which meant for him--an artist just a small in number years younger than the Abstract-Expressionist gods--that he had to make abstractions. He could not, however, allow himself the step of simple belief required to make an unsourced image. For paintings like as Yarn and the shadow and Easter ovum paintings, Warhol found or made photographic images that mimicked or could pass for Ab-Ex statements while retaining a necessary literalness. As a relation to classic Jackson Pollock drip paintings, Yarn is a deliciously fickle image, evincing the pair profound belief and healthy agnosticism towards the fundamental commands of abstraction.

When Reichek seized on Warhol's Yarn and embroidered the image at a a great deal of reduced scale, she doubled his indirect appropriation of Pollock We understand her rejoinder, her contribution to the Pollock/Warhol dialogue, as questioning the value of Warhors transformation of a photograph of yarn back into the realm of painting, for the tangled yarn is already clearly Pollockian. Warhol's choice of yarn, all fuzzy feminine domesticity, was clearly a queering of Pollock Reichek's embroidery translation regender the pair butch Pollock and femme Warhol, her needle piercing the deified personas of these sum of two units art-gods with the same stitch.

In Sampler (World Wide Web), 1998 Reichek replicates a primitive Apple computer protection It is filled with words associated with her medium: "Spin spin-off spin a yarn spin a web web of deceit/net wove weave a charm ... embroider the truth embroider a fantasy." It is as if the free-associative piece of poetry had been created by a owned Web search engine trying to find each possible direction in which to look after associations--which also describes Reichek's possess working process. In her art, the directness or centrality of each connection is not as crucial as its bare possibility. We are not meant to understand each of her associations as essential to an investigation of her sources. Rather we learn from Reichek's promiscuous wanderings completely through cultural history that when we interrogate these percepts masterworks or otherwise, for their unnoticed links to craft history, there are ofttimes fascinating connections to be brought to the surface.