Jodi Coletta’s "One Day", 2010
On a trip to New York in March, I started out in Philadelphia to catch the opening of FiberPhiladelphia 2012. An artist friend who lives there told me about the events and it caused me to start the trip in Philly rather than heading directly to New York.
Turns out the timing was good to catch Elissa Auther speak, as she was the keynote speaker of the event. Her talk, based loosely on her book String, Felt, Thread, was presented to a full and diverse auditorium at Moore College of Art, about trends in fine art and how the inclusion of craft based materials and processes have crept into the mainstream.
As I reviewed my photos to add to posts from the whole trip, it seemed like there were more examples of fiber related works not only in Philadelphia but at the art fairs in New York even though I might be a bit myopic (see a future post for more on the NY art fairs). Below are a few from Philadelphia.
A Knitter sighting at the lecture at Ross Gallery given by Philadelphia-based Mi-Kyoung Lee, who has had her woven backdrops incorporated in theater productions around the globe. The lecture was in conjunction with the exhibit In Material and Lee’s piece (the red form against the back wall called Untitled (unimaginative) and was created in 2011 out of thousands of twist ties. Turns out the knitter in front of me is a Japanese American who was interned at Heart Mountain, Wyoming during World War II – small world.
This piece by Betsabe Romero, an artist who lives and works in Mexico City caught my eye as an innovative reuse. A carved tire becomes a printmaking tool! "Encuentros en el Cruce", carved tire printed on a Mexican shawl, 2011.
Jodi Coletta’s "One Day", 2010, strikes a new take on what to do with discarded plastic bags that newspapers come in. This obsessive twisting is just the kind of work that makes me look twice.