BUILT ON THE SITE of … / Installation

Feeling grateful that I live in a town crazy enough to invite me do a little takeover of the Municipal Building. Huge thanks to the Village Arts Commission of Hastings-on-Hudson for their support and to all the wonderful folks in Village Hall who let me hang out there with my coax cable in the wee hours of the night.

BUILT ON THE SITE of...

Art Installation
Village Hall, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
April 16 – June 8, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday April 21, 6-9pm

At the street-level entrance to Hastings-on-Hudson’s Municipal Building, a Museum in the Streets sign explains to visitors and passersby that the Village Hall is “BUILT ON THE SITE of the home of Joseph Treanor, owner of a waterfront bluestone yard.” Teased from the signage, BUILT ON THE SITE of... opens up stories of the Municipal Building’s past lives, unearthing from its surfaces pages upon pages of ghostly fragments and remains. Warped paper forms fill walls, frayed communication cables travel here and there, and threaded maps spread elsewhere. These and other site-specific interventions meander through the building, where physical and administrative architectures operate not as passive backdrops for art hanging, but as active portals for imagining other times and other places.

Table Settings / The Fine Art Textiles Award

Insanely honoured to learn that Table Settings has been shortlisted for The Fine Arts Textile Award 2022 alongside the incredible work of 13 other artists. The shortlisted artworks will be exhibited at The Festival of Quilts this August and The Knitting and Stitching Show in London and Harrogate October and November.

🍽🖤🤍

Table Settings, 2020-21
Four weeks of dinner tracings with pencil and thread on recycled household linens
68 x 48 inches

Table Settings gives form to the accumulated tracings of plates, utensils and all the other objects that make up the shifting terrain of a single dinner table. It quietly grapples with patterns of everyday life made more apparent and more tangible over the course of countless days and nights. The patterns are belabored and bewildering—on one side a record of relations and movement, and on the other a tactile universe emerging from lines that are normally wiped away.

Greyshift / Miniartextil 2019

Greyshift, made with STUDIOOSS, is on view at the 2019 edition of Miniartextil in Como, Italy, September 28—November 17, 2019.

Greyshift
Pleated silk and threads machine stitched on die-cut and painted paper
20cm x 3cm expandable to 35cm
Made in Singapore
2019

Greyshift transforms paper off-cuts from our pop-up book, The Dining Room, into a moveable viewing device that expands from two to three dimensions across the black and white spectrum—from the flat, negative spaces of single planes of paper into a passageway defined by the curious betweens.

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One map, two ways

B-PLOT collaboration in process … Here, Little India, Singapore. One map, two ways.

Charles Counts

Untitled, by Charles Counts, made by Rubynelle Counts and members of the New Salem Community, c. 1965

source: Robert Shaw, The Art Quilt (Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc., 1997)

“Log Cabin” blocks arranged in a pattern called “Straight Furrow.” Pennsylvania. ca. 1890. Cotton. 74 x 74

from Jonathan Holstein's Abstract Design in American Quilts: A Biography of an Exhibition (Louisville, KY: The Kentucky Quilt Project Inc, 1991)

Stephen Sollins

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Elergy (Tulips), 2003 (source: Arthur Roger Gallery)

Stephen Sollins
Elergy (Tulips), 2003
embroidery and removed embroidery
49.5 x 53.25 inches

Kawandi quilts

Kawandi quilts on exhibit @the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco: Soulful Stitching: Patchwork Quilts by Africans (Siddis) in India features 32 striking patchwork quilts made by Siddi women, heirs to the culture and values of Africans brought to Goa on India’s west coast beginning in the 16th century. While they have adopted and integrated many cultural aspects of the Indian peoples with whom they have lived for generations, Siddis have also retained and transformed certain cultural and artistic traditions from Africa. Soulful Stitching provides an opportunity to explore the African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World through these colorful and vibrant quilts that demonstrate how cultural forms and traditions have been adapted throughout the Diaspora. The traveling exhibition is co-curated by Dr. Henry J. Drewal, Evjue-Bascom Professor of African and African Diaspora Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr. Sarah K. Khan, Director of the Tasting Cultures Foundation... Numbering about 20,000 today, [Siddis] live in small villages scattered in the forests and high plains and are renowned for their unique patchwork quilts known as kawandi. Quilts are created by women for family members and used as mattresses or covers. Small, baby-sized kawandi, often decorated with small, brightly colored patches known as tikeli, fill wooden cribs suspended from the rafters of Siddi homes. Larger quilts for three or more persons is seen as auspicious as it implies a growing family with children. (image source)