Lou Cabeen at Carl Hammer - Chicago, Illinois

one time a painter, Lou Cabeen took up weaving and embroidery to disrupt the conventions of "women's work," politicizing the quaint and charming. Using the seductively pleasing without being striking formats of doilies and samplers, handkerchiefs and tea towels, Cabeen deconstruct handicraft traditions to make bare the ideologies underlying their perceived appropriateness as womanly enterprises. Her strategic incorporation of body propels this domestic bric-a-brac into the realm of feminist critique. While Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer overset the language of broadcast media and public address, Cabeen explores the residence front, reexamining those aphorisms and activities intended to hold women in "their place."

In the Subversive Stitch (1984) Rozsika, Parker traced the use of needlework to inculcate "feminine" behavior: drawn out silent hours spent hunched above a sampler were part of a girl's education in passive obedience and piety, while male philosophers admonished women "to use their tongues les and their needle more." Cabeen examines the oppressiveness of of the like kind instruction, and its implications in her have a title to life, in Self-Portrait III. The work consists of a doily which, as a child, she embroidered with a ring of golden flowers; supplementing the work in 1992 she stiched sum of two units concentric circles of text: "don't think, don't have feeling need nothing," and "your dreams are our dreams." While the latter claim deliver overs to one generation's imposition of its values upon the next - a mother transmitting skills and attitudes to a coming time wife and homemaker - the repeat itself is from Dan Quayle, addressing the NAACP. Cabeen's bring under rule thus becomes social oppression in a larger faculty of perception and the doily an ironic remark on the psychological manipulations of any dominant class above those it seeks to control

In Remembrance, Cabeen attacks simple-minded cliches presented for the contemplation of girls learning to wield their needle At the center of the work is a pice of embroidered linen purchased in a thrift store Cross-stitched over a commercially printed pattern, the anonymous handiwork proclaims, "Remembrance is the Sweetest Flower that in a Garden Grows" Cabeen stretched the woven fabric with fish hooks and wire, in a gorgeous frame of fake fruits and flowers - blushing pears, grapes, r silk rose In contradiction to the cloying adage inscribed upon the linen, however, this metaphorical garden is infested with pain: the grapes are pierced through tiny pins, rubber snakes lie in wait in the leafy border, and razor blades hide among the rose petals. The construction of femininity advertised in the embroidery pattern is undercut by dint of disturbing suggestions of anger and aggression, as Cabeen uncloses the girl's psychic garden to mingled feelings of attraction, revulsion and fear.

granting she uncovers the role of sewing or needlework in the constricting socialization of girls, Cabeen does not grasp the labor of craftswomen in contumely There is a poignancy to her critique, different in spirit from Mike Kelley's mocking send-up of kitsch facts like stuffed monkeys or bears worked from craft kits by the agency of grandmothers, mothers and aunts. Those women would recognize the Simplicity pattern for a materialed animal that Cabeen includes in Unacknowledged Aspects of Craft Morphology II. The pattern pieces, juxtaposed and overlapping in a jagged rectangle, form the soil for a chain-stitched sampler verse: "Regard the world with cautious eye/Nor raise your expectations high / diocese that the balanced scale be of the like kind / You neither fear nor reliance too much." Fron all of Cabeen's art issues a delicate lament for the unrealized human potential and arrested ambitions reified in centuries of precious handiwork through women.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group