The Embroidered Image reviewed in Knotwe

Hagar Vardimon: Climbing, 2012

This week a show that lit the New York skyline in the fibers world will be closing this Friday, August 15th. We hope it is one of many more to come that showcase the diverse range of contemporary artists who have emboldened not only the embroidery world's imagination but represent a, dare we say it, movement, well afoot of contemporary artists utilizing the conceptual strengths and mark making splendor of embroidery on photo images. The show's curator Orly Cogan selected an international brew of artists who are each working and drawing the thread through images in their own distinct way. The exhibition at the Robert Mann Gallery is well worth the visit for multiple reasons including sheer inspiration. There are pieces in the show that are cleverly mounted such as the works of Mathew Cox and Pinky/MM Bass who both touch on the biological image as backdrop for their technical feats of embroidery goodness. Artists Flore Gardner, Melissa Zexter and Jose Romussi create stunning works that use pattern as an overlay that Photoshop can never compete with however adept it is at hyper-aestheticizing the image. And speaking of the pixelated subject, the work of Diane Meyer terrifically disperses stitch like a blanket of blurred memory or identity obscured by anonymity.

To continue reading the article and short interviews with several Embroidered Image artists, click here.

Maroesjka Lavigne in LensCulture's Top 50 Emerging Talents

Gallery artist Maroesjka Lavigne was named one of LensCulture's Top 50 Emerging Talents of 2014 with her series You are More than Beautiful, a photographic essay focused on plastic surgery in Seoul, South Korea.

The artist writes: Pressure is high in Seoul in almost every part of life. Getting into a good school, finding a good job, finding a man and having a wealthy life is not taken for granted. People have to compete with each other all the time. And of course beauty is a very important part of this competition. But Seoul takes it to a next level. A picture on your school application or job interview is a must. That's why looks are a very important part of your future. Girls get nose jobs as a graduating gift to get a better job.

To read the full artist's statement about the series and view a selection of images, click here. 

Julie Blackmon at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now
September 13, 2014 — January 19, 2015
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Bentonville, AK

Julie Blackmon's iconic piece Stock Tank is featured in State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a landmark exhibition which presents the work of outstanding contemporary American artists. Blackmon's ingenious and engaging commentary on American domesticity was selected from an initial pool of over 1,000 artists, and provides a piquant element to the landscape of American art today.

Read the exhibition press release and find more information about the exhibition here.

Paulette Tavormina featured in National Geographic

A sumptuous still life by Paulette Tavormina illustrated the story "A Moveable Feast" in the July issue of National Geographic Magazine. Featuring fruits and vegetables from four markets in Manhattan, the image highlights Tavormina's signature painterly aestheticism while commenting on the hot-button environmental issue of produce sourcing. Explore the feature online here.

The Embroidered Image reviewed in The Village Voice

The Embroidered Image is "Sew Revealing" at Robert Mann Gallery
By Jessica Dawson

For women, photos are the things we live up to—and get shown up by—every single day. We get it: Once you're in the pages of Vogue, your thighs and breasts belong to surgery or Photoshop, or both. It's not reality.

Traditionally, sewing is women's work, and many of these artists (all but two are women) address the constraints of gender.

Yet our mammalian brains, impervious to logic and fond of fantasy, remain willing to think, if for a moment: Could this be real? And, more important: Should this be me?

So let the weak among us bid welcome to photography shows alert to the lies photos tell us. "The Embroidered Image," at Chelsea's Robert Mann Gallery, is one such enterprise; it collects 11 artists who alter photos with needle and brightly hued thread, adding the most flagrant of adornments to found and new images. Each reminds us of a photograph's inclination to enhance, exposing the artifice inside every frame.

Traditionally, sewing is women's work, and many of these artists (all but two are women) address the constraints of gender. Several use portraits of 1950s-era ladies done up in bouffants, or old Hollywood movie stars, or generally gorgeous folk. Jessica Wohl sews starburst-like masks across sitters' faces, lending them a mystical, almost animal quality that suggests a wildness lurking below the costumes of polite society. Hagar Vardimon stitches cheerful colored threads in fishnet patterns across headshots of black-and-white movie stars like Joan Fontaine, as if plotting out a face lift or a skin disease. Whether it's to ruin or enhance her subjects' beauty remains unclear.

Continue reading the article here.

The Embroidered Image reviewed in Photograph Magazine

Multiple Exposures: Jewelry and Photography/The Embroidered Image
Museum of Arts and Design/Robert Mann Gallery, New York

The steady stream of images that comes our way electronically every day can make any single picture feel intangible, endlessly reproducible, and easy to dismiss. But two current exhibitions are emphasizing the materiality of the photograph—its object-ness and uniqueness. The Embroidered Image at Robert Mann Gallery through August 15 includes 10 artists who transform photographs using the humble domestic tools of needle and thread... Handiwork is the subject of The Embroidered Image as well, in terms of its decorative and its transformative properties. In a show that could have tilted toward the sentimental, curator Orly Cogan instead chose works that were pleasantly odd and humorously unsettling. The most successful images went beyond altering the surface of the image and engaged with the medium on a deeper level. The sneaky needlework in Diane Meyer's photographs of barren Berlin streetscapes, for example, mimicked photography's pixelization. Jane Waggoner Deschner quilted black and white photographs together in a contemporary twist on the domestic arts of the family photo album, quilts, and keepsakes, but her works include symbols or existential questions (What can I hope?). Orly Cogan's works involved pages from auction catalogues that she embellished with wry needlework doodles. A Babar-like embroidered elephant pops out of a window on a page documenting a Peter Beard elephant, for example. The Cat in the Hat and Lyle the Crocodile make appearances in other works — all pages from auctions catalogues, all featuring artworks by men (Saul Steinberg, Robert Indiana, Adam Fuss), complete with pricing information and provenance. Cogan playfully undercuts both the art market and the prevalence of the male artist in that market with her pointed play on traditional women's work.

—Jean Dykstra

Read the full article online here.

Jeff Brouws at The Autry Center in Los Angeles

Route 66: The Road and The Romance
The Autry in Griffith Park: George Montgomery Gallery
Los Angeles
June 8, 2014 - January 4, 2015

A selection of black-and-white works by Jeff Brouws will be exhibited alongside Ed Ruscha's original photographs from Twentysix Gasoline Stations in a new exhibition at The Autry Center in Los Angeles, focused on the rise and fall of the famed Route 66. The museum writes:

In 1956, Route 66 was effectively bypassed by the Interstate Highway System. In this final section, the popularity of Route 66 is further diminished by air travel and the allure of attractions such as Disneyland and Las Vegas. The commercial exploitation of Route 66 by multinational chain stores, restaurants, and motels also eroded the unique appeal of the road. Ironically, the first McDonald's was opened along the route in San Bernardino in 1940. The exhibition documents the degradation of the road and its surrounding businesses with pieces of asphalt from the original roadway and several photographs from Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) set alongside Jeff Brouws's stark 1991 "updates" of the same sites.

Read more about the exhibition here.

The Embroidered Image reviewed in Musée Magazine

The latest exhibition at the Robert Mann Gallery is one of home sewn sensibility. Orly Cogan, presenting the work of various artists, curates the show titled The Embroidered Image. The exhibition takes vintage photographs, catalogue pages and x-rays, reclaiming them with hand embroidery to turn them on their head.

The work intrudes upon the picturesque life of the past. Delicate lines of thread insert color, destruct staged portraiture, expand the line of vision and block out the images altogether, interrupting typical ethereal suburbia. It's as if the photos were found in a dusty family photo album hidden in the attic. This combined with the idea of home crafting, give the indication of domestic life, expanding the idea of embroidery to serve a more artistic purpose.

The artists each take their own angle on The Embroidered Image. Melissa Zexter uses the context of the scene, overlaid with pattern to fit the theme. Pinky/MM Bass dissects naked human bodies, sewing in anatomical forms. Diane Meyer's work uses pixilation, blurring the stark solid architectural environments. Hagar Vadimon uses brightly colored geometric imagery, masking out portraits and inserting totem poles into perfectly manicured suburban lawns. Matthew Cox and Orly Cogan use cartoons to add childlike pop culture on x-rays and art catalogues, poking fun at more sophisticated matters. Photo collages are sewn together by Jane Waggoner Deschner, in an almost scrapbooking manner, another connection to domestic life. Jessica Wohl uses thickly embroidered starbursts to block out entire subjects to isolate certain areas of the photo. And finally Hinke Schreuders' rough embroidery, ink and linen give the look of images printed on raw silk.

—Ashley Minyard

Read the article online here.

Jeff Brouws at Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

Road Trip: America Through the Windshield
Brattleboro Museum and Art Center
Brattleboro, Vermont
June 27 — October 26, 2014

Brouws' Storage Units, 2002-2011 will be exhibited at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center beginning late June. The museum writes:

Since ancient times, depicting the landscape has been a way for artists to explore the relationship between nature and humankind. In recent times, that relationship has often been experienced by car, as part of a daily commute or an epic Kerouacian journey. Through imagery ranging from urban street scenes, in which billboards and stoplights replace trees and mountains, to national parks and highway tourist attractions, the artists in this exhibit explore the ways in which the road has transformed our relationship to the American landscape.

Read more about the exhibition here.

Maroesjka Lavigne: Ísland reviewed in Artnet News

May 12, 2014
Elizabeth Manus

Some words for Ísland, or Iceland as it's written in Icelandic: hoarfrost, white-hot, névé. And now, some pictures for Ísland, each of them on display at Robert Mann Gallery. Here work by the young Belgian photographer Lavigne, who (according to press materials) drove alone across Iceland for four months, evokes the kind of world that a 19th-century snowshoe-clad loner could love—spare, brightly lit, and miles from cities jammed with multi-story filing cabinets stuffed with people and their belongings. Snowmen, Reykjavik (2011) shows a circle of sun-faceted snow menhirs (clean white) foregrounding a lone soccer goal on a grassy field, a line of blue water and, farther in the distance, ghost-white houses. Phantom, Krossneslaug, Westfjords (2011) has a man just below the surface of a glacial pool, the dapple of light and liquid erasing his facial features. A Kelly green Excavator, On the Road (2011) raises the question of what Iceland needs to clear away in order to develop. Perhaps some precincts of the world deserve their blank spaces, Lavigne suggests, deserve to be left to themselves and their own quiet thoughts—like the faraway-eyed young woman in Hildur in Her Car, Mosfellbaer (2012), or the individuals taking the thermal waters in 2011's Blue Lagoon, Reykjavik. Or artists.

To read the article online, click here.