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90 inform selvedge.org 01 Opekar/Webster colle ction 02 R ob Mostert Between the Sea and the Desert: The Many Cultures of North Africa 21 November 2007-18 May 2008, Textile Museum of Canada, 55 Centre Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, T: 416 599 5321, www.textilemuseum.ca This exhibition of cloth from the northwest part of Africa, or the Maghreb{an Arabic word meaning ‘place of the sun set’} is the result of curator Natalia Nekrassova's, skilled selection from the 250 specimens of Northwest African tex tiles belonging to the Museum's permanent collection. Two 19th-century wedding belts from Fez, in Morocco demonstrate extraordinary weaving skill. They were both woven on a draw loom using a warp faced twill technique to create multiple patterns with a resist-dyed silk thread. The technique necessitates a change in warp colour in the middle of the belt allowing the weaver to continue the pat terns in a new colour, traditionally inverting the motifs so they mirror those in the preceding section. In the second piece there is no mirror effect but rather a radically differ ent set of designs in each area of colour warp. Floral designs start out along the red warp and turn architectural in the yellow, this piece seems to draw from a whole range of Islamic imagery. Each piece on display can lead to speculation on the origin and meaning of pattern. Moving from these delicate silk weaving and embroideries to the rougher, less refined textiles, the patterns, use of colour and the skill of the weaver remain strong. In her curatorial essay, Nekrassova informs us that there are two traditions in rug weaving in Maghreb. The urban based ‘pile weaving’ along with the older ‘flat weave’ traditions which includes the rugs and weaving of the Berber people of the Atlas Mountains. The rural rugs are woven on horizontal looms by women using the wool of the local white and brown sheep to create intri cate geometric designs in supplementary weft and weft float weave, with two-strand twining exclusively a charac teristic of Berber weaving in the High Atlas Mountains. There is a mid-20th century Berber rug from Gafsa, Tunisia in the show, which is a hybrid of both traditions, and assumed to be a result of rural weavers exposure to urban rugs. The Ait Ouaouzguite Berber “tribe's location on the trans-Atlas and trans-Saharan trade routes... make this cultural influence possible” explains Nekrassova. The rug, though simplistic in design, has an incredible graphic beauty. Borders and horizontal bands are woven in a knotted-pile technique in a palette of orange, red and yellow not the traditional brown and white flat weave. This combination of influence and tradition occur ring over generations, in a small geographic area may appear to be of no particular consequence. In an inter net age where ideas, designs and materials are a click away the thought of waiting for the next Camel seems like a Hollywood story line not the reality of less then a cen tury ago. These textiles have travelled through a long his tory and without a voice or the given name of a specific weaver this exhibition creates a sophisticated choral symphony. “Every thread has a soul” {Arab proverb} and current trends in writing and curatorial work would have us believe they can tell stories. In the past two years with Wandering Weavers: Nomadic Traditions of Asia , 2006 and this current exhibition, Natalia Nekrassova has provided an expan sive look at Islamic textiles. She has made an important collection available to the public and presented sufficient information to invite the viewer to engage with – rather than merely observe – these textiles. ••• Joe Lewis 01 Rug, Tunisia, mid 20th century Pricked: Extreme Embroidery 8 November 2007- (extended) 27 April 2008, Museum of Arts and Design, 40 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019, T: 212 956 3535 www.madmuseum.org Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, is a sequel to Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting, the museum's successful show of last spring. David McFadden, the chief curator, assembled the show, filling three floors with 60 works of art that push tech nique and material innovation, but also find personal and political expression without becoming too conceptual. The shows address the recent popularity of traditional needlework forms, like knitting, lace, crochet and embroi dery. Susie Brandt's Smidgedominates the ground floor colourful cascading circles cut from polka dotted fabric are suspended in a monofilament web. This beautiful and ghostly quilt cuts something new from the traditional. Brothers William and Steven Ladd collaborate on Spider, another flawless sculpture – a finely crafted handbag in turquoise ultrasuede complete with archival case. The artists ply and stitch using their grandmother's embroidery threads, creating a soft cashmere web of mossy texture to produce a piece as playful as it is innovative. Often works have a grounding in the history of fabric arts. Laura Splan's pristine white machine-embroidered lace doilies have a modern twist: they display molecular structures of viruses, and carry titles like Herpes, HIV, Flu and SARS. Sabrina Gschwandtner contributes A History of String, a video projection onto a stretched free standing embroidery hoop and a zoetrope with images and text. The video presents an explicit historical and cultural context for the string in the piece. The political becomes more overt in some cases. Dafna Kaffeman's, Arabic Is Not Spoken Here comprises two embroidered handkerchiefs, one with
page 93
03 Paddy Hartley 04 Matt Flynn Hebrew characters, the other with Arabic. Flame-worked glass plants reference the cultures and her native Israel, and play with ideas of similarity and difference. Many pieces in the show reference the history of fiber art as women's work. In Tamar Stone's A Case of Confinement, an antique doll bed is covered in machine embroidered words from journals, publications and diaries from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Stone turns the bed into a book that can only be read by peeling back the linens and exposing each story – gory primary texts detailing the birthing experiences of those eras – fear of delivery, poor medical care and mental anguish. Xiang Yang presents The Truth That People Are Not Willing to Face- Bushism vs. Saddamism . The sculpture unites George Bush with Saddam Hussein in a three dimensional rainbow web of silk thread that connects finely crafted silk-screened portraits of the two men at opposite ends of a silhouetted (political) spectrum. Yang's piece is straight-forward and powerful, challenging notions of embroidery with beauty and a direct message. While some of the pieces were innovative, there could have been more focus on exploration of scale and materials. Some of the works were extreme only in their political content; their materials and technical elements were less ambitious and experimental. A more selective curatorial approach might also have strengthened some of the show's themes, and given deserved space to some of the excellent smaller works. Together with the prior show, Pricked emphasises that embroidery and other newly resurgent forms have become more than a mere trend. The museum is celebrating the maturity of the recent wave of fiber arts. •••Elyse Allen 02 Count your Blessings, Tilleke Schwarz, 2003 03 Spreckley 1 (detail), Paddy Hartley, 2007 Multiple Choice: From Sample to Product 9 November 2007-6 April 2008, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street New York, NY 10128, T: 212 849 8400, www.cooperhewitt.org This small but dense exhibition presents sample books and other sampling formats used as tools either for sales or design development. The exhibition is drawn from the collections of the Cooper Hewitt and the Smithsonian Institution Library. Though it includes a variety of media, including textiles, tablewares, wallpaper and cross-stitch needles, some of which are absolutely stunning, the exhi bition provides a rather staid, muted glimpse into the rich history and forecasted obsolescence of physical samples. I suspect that the main objective of the exhibition was to inspire viewers by the beauty of the samples, and here the exhibition mostly succeeds. Some of the works are astonishing - a French sales book of sample buttons from the 18th century includes exquisite buttons attached to paper, still housed in a decaying hemp cover. I was duly impressed with a hand-painted window shade sample, and drawings for wall decorations on vellum made from fine animal skins. An English fashion pattern sample book from 1784 displays beautiful velveteen textiles. Yet the show lacks engagement beyond the display of pretty things roughly organised by media. Though the accompanying exhibition brochure begins, logically, with medieval model books, the actual exhibition starts with textile and fashion samples from the 20th century on one side, and interior decoration samples on its other entry point. Why didn't the curators mix media to provide examination of the works through a more engaged point of view? One sample book text describes a fascinating instance of industrial sabotage wherein an English expa triate secretly handed over sample textiles to the French; intellectually property is just one sub-theme that could have been explored through a different arrangement of the works in the show. There are other moments where interest piqued is not fulfilled – few samples were accompanied by examples of the actual finished products. While it was satisfying to see sample cup designs placed next to cups that show how the drawings were interpreted in their final products, the lack of examples of how lace, woven and embroidered band samples were used was frustrating. A video projected onto a back wall, showing a woman's hands turning the pages of several sample books, is a good idea badly executed. Amidst the physical objects, this recorded footage of them is frustrating – projected onto a wall without any accompanying text, you're forced to watch the whole thing if only to discern whether it depicts sample books already on view or if it includes books that aren't in the exhibition. The online version of this video is better; the video is broken into smaller parts and you can choose which book you want to look at. In fact the accompanying website is arguably more engaging than the physical exhibition. Online visitors can click from one product to another, read ing explanatory text for each and referring to the glossary of helpful terms. You can even see photos of the installation process on a linked blog. Since the aesthetic value of the works in the show also come across online, I recommend the internet show over the museum version – a sad conclusion for an exhibition dedicated to trumpeting the value of physical objects. ••• Sabrina Gschwandtner 04 Button sample book, France, late 18th century, Pinchbeck, gilded metal, metal foil, thread and paillettes; paper, woven fabric 91 inform selvedge.org

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01

Opekar/Webster colle ction

02 R ob Mostert

Between the Sea and the Desert: The Many Cultures of North Africa

21 November 2007-18 May 2008, Textile Museum of

Canada, 55 Centre Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, T: 416 599

5321, www.textilemuseum.ca

This exhibition of cloth from the northwest part of Africa, or

the Maghreb{an Arabic word meaning ‘place of the sun

set’} is the result of curator Natalia Nekrassova's, skilled

selection from the 250 specimens of Northwest African tex

tiles belonging to the Museum's permanent collection.

Two 19th-century wedding belts from Fez, in Morocco

demonstrate extraordinary weaving skill. They were both

woven on a draw loom using a warp faced twill technique

to create multiple patterns with a resist-dyed silk thread.

The technique necessitates a change in warp colour in the

middle of the belt allowing the weaver to continue the pat

terns in a new colour, traditionally inverting the motifs so

they mirror those in the preceding section. In the second

piece there is no mirror effect but rather a radically differ

ent set of designs in each area of colour warp. Floral

designs start out along the red warp and turn architectural

in the yellow, this piece seems to draw from a whole range

of Islamic imagery.

Each piece on display can lead to speculation on the

origin and meaning of pattern. Moving from these delicate

silk weaving and embroideries to the rougher, less refined

textiles, the patterns, use of colour and the skill of the

weaver remain strong. In her curatorial essay, Nekrassova

informs us that there are two traditions in rug weaving in

Maghreb. The urban based ‘pile weaving’ along with the

older ‘flat weave’ traditions which includes the rugs and

weaving of the Berber people of the Atlas Mountains. The

rural rugs are woven on horizontal looms by women using

the wool of the local white and brown sheep to create intri

cate geometric designs in supplementary weft and weft

float weave, with two-strand twining exclusively a charac

teristic of Berber weaving in the High Atlas Mountains.

There is a mid-20th century Berber rug from Gafsa,

Tunisia in the show, which is a hybrid of both traditions,

and assumed to be a result of rural weavers exposure to

urban rugs. The Ait Ouaouzguite Berber “tribe's location on

the trans-Atlas and trans-Saharan trade routes... make this

cultural influence possible” explains Nekrassova. The rug,

though simplistic in design, has an incredible graphic

beauty. Borders and horizontal bands are woven in

a knotted-pile technique in a palette of orange, red and

yellow not the traditional brown and white flat weave.

This combination of influence and tradition occur

ring over generations, in a small geographic area may

appear to be of no particular consequence. In an inter

net age where ideas, designs and materials are a click

away the thought of waiting for the next Camel seems like

a Hollywood story line not the reality of less then a cen

tury ago. These textiles have travelled through a long his

tory and without a voice or the given name of a specific

weaver this exhibition creates a sophisticated choral

symphony. “Every thread has a soul” {Arab proverb} and

current trends in writing and curatorial work would have

us believe they can tell stories.

In the past two years with Wandering Weavers:

Nomadic Traditions of Asia , 2006 and this current

exhibition, Natalia Nekrassova has provided an expan

sive look at Islamic textiles. She has made an important

collection available to the public and presented sufficient

information to invite the viewer to engage with – rather

than merely observe – these textiles. ••• Joe Lewis

01 Rug, Tunisia, mid 20th century

Pricked: Extreme Embroidery

8 November 2007- (extended) 27 April 2008, Museum

of Arts and Design, 40 West 53rd Street, New York, NY

10019, T: 212 956 3535 www.madmuseum.org

Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, is a sequel to Radical Lace &

Subversive Knitting, the museum's successful show of last

spring. David McFadden, the chief curator, assembled the

show, filling three floors with 60 works of art that push tech

nique and material innovation, but also find personal and

political expression without becoming too conceptual.

The shows address the recent popularity of traditional

needlework forms, like knitting, lace, crochet and embroi

dery. Susie Brandt's Smidgedominates the ground floor

colourful cascading circles cut from polka dotted fabric are

suspended in a monofilament web. This beautiful and

ghostly quilt cuts something new from the traditional.

Brothers William and Steven Ladd collaborate on Spider,

another flawless sculpture – a finely crafted handbag in

turquoise ultrasuede complete with archival case. The

artists ply and stitch using their grandmother's embroidery

threads, creating a soft cashmere web of mossy texture to

produce a piece as playful as it is innovative.

Often works have a grounding in the history of fabric

arts. Laura Splan's pristine white machine-embroidered

lace doilies have a modern twist: they display molecular

structures of viruses, and carry titles like Herpes, HIV, Flu

and SARS. Sabrina Gschwandtner contributes A History of

String, a video projection onto a stretched free standing

embroidery hoop and a zoetrope with images and text. The

video presents an explicit historical and cultural context for

the string in the piece. The political becomes more overt in

some cases. Dafna Kaffeman's, Arabic Is Not Spoken Here

comprises two embroidered handkerchiefs, one with

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