91吃瓜黑料网

Artist Statement

This series of weavings exposes the generally hidden forms of retail clothing racks, with the racks becoming the central motif rather than being hidden under rows of clothing for sale. Before fast fashion, people had deep care and use relationships with each of their garments. My great-grandparents and grandparents all made many well-crafted home goods, including clothing, quilts and furniture, but these practices were not carried on by their children (my parents, aunts and uncles). Now, clothing is considered disposable. With the rise of inexpensive readymade clothes produced by industrial textile equipment and underpaid mostly overseas labor came the rapid decline in common knowledge of textile construction techniques.

In these human-scale banners, I reconfigure various traditional weaving patterns including overshot, twills and waffle weave. Many of these patterns were used by early white settlers who colonized what is now the United States. They wove for subsistence before readymade cloth was available. Variations have also been used by weavers all over the world since shortly after the evolution of humans, when weaving evolved too. The sculptural stands holding my weavings reference warp-weighted and vertical looms, which have been used since prehistoric times.

With the invention of the Jacquard loom in the early 19th century, weavers were suddenly able to incorporate complex organic shapes and combine patterns within their weavings in the course of a day or two in a way that was previously only possible with thousands of hours of work. At the same time, other industrial textile equipment to produce all different types of fabric proliferated, and the cottage textile industry in the early United States swiftly disappeared as factories took over cloth production. This disappearance followed the cultural erasure and land theft that the same white settlers acted out when they arrived in America and displaced and killed Indigenous people already living here. In much the same way, the contemporary clothing industry continues to displace particularly the most marginalized people by polluting water, creating unsafe and unsustainable working conditions, and dumping unimaginable quantities of discarded clothing in landfills.

I made these weavings using a very different type of Jacquard loom than the one invented in 1804, which is also the kind that is still commonly used in industry today. The works in this exhibition were produced using a TC2, or thread controller 2, Jacquard loom, invented by Vibeke Vestby in the late 1990s. Vestby鈥檚 objective was to return the power of increased thread control to handweavers: the TC2 is operated using a combination of digital image files (often created by hacking Photoshop) that the loom鈥檚 computer reads, a vacuum pump fed in above the loom that individually raises specific threads to create the design, and the physical movement of yarn through the path created by the loom鈥檚 raised threads that the artist operating the loom feeds in to make the cloth. Although Jacquard weaving was invented to eliminate the need for cooperative, small-scale production, weaving on the TC2 loom as I do to make these works recenters the Jacquard weaving process in the tradition of weaving as collaboration: maintaining the loom requires a team of people working together, generally made up of artists and students who are also making weavings on the loom.

The collaborative nature of the TC2 inherently invites the sharing of knowledge and cooperative teaching. Although this exhibition cannot change the linear trajectory of clothing from factory to store to consumer to landfill, and the cultural and environmental costs that comes with this cycle, I do hope that it will inspire curiosity and criticality about how, where, why and for whom cloth is made.