Hanging by a Thread

MIAMI - Hanging by a Thread, an exhibition curated by Nina Arias and Jose Diaz that explores the use of craft in contemporary art, will be on view at The Moore Space from September 8-October 22, 2005. Twenty-nine mid-career and emerging artists including Ghada Amer, Hope Atherton, Nina Lola Bachhuber Brian Belott, Cosima Von Bonin, Elaine Bradford, Orly Cogan, Rowena Dring, Tracey Emin, Angelo Filomeno, Hanna Fushihara Aron, FriendsWithYou, Jacin Giodano, Danielle Gustafson-Sundell, Kent Henricksen, Christian Holstad, Misaki Kawai, Frankie Martin, Leah Modigliani, Gean Moreno, Mark Newport, Jon Pylypchuk, Tal R, Michael Raedecker, Kristine Roepstorff, Diego Singh, Frances Trombly and William Villalongo will be featured.

Hanging by a Thread pays homage to Loose Threads, a 1998 exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery that examined the boundaries between high art and craft. The Miami exhibition explores the current status of craft processes in use by artists today and makes a case for craft’s revisited importance in contemporary art.

The diverse works in Hanging by a Thread are varied and eccentric, but united by a common impulse. The art in this exhibition is not hermetically sealed in theory; instead it uses the language of lived experience to communicate, to inform, to tell stories, to create scenarios, and conjure imagined worlds. This exhibition seizes the opportunity to assess the myriad of creative appropriations of manual skill and hand craft, which have appeared on the scene since 1998.

The artists in Hanging by a Thread have assimilated all manner of stitchery with patent disregard for an art historical canon. The abject and the debased co-exist with the child-like and the frivolous. References abound to toiles and tapestry as well as to the lowly stuffed animal. The work in Serpentine Gallery exhibition,

which relied on feminist theory or anti-Greenbergian notions for critical validation,

has been replaced by works in which pure beauty, nostalgia for counter-culture fashion and agitated decoration speak to an art audience obsessed with camp, the mock-naïve, and soft-porn.

In this age of digital and cyber-technology, the allure of the hand-made is even more radical for a second generation of crafters. As multi-national retail chains brainwash consumers who idolize and covet the uniformity of recognizable brands, young artists have revived the cult of personality. Hanging by a Thread continues the exploration of pioneer artists who have taken the first steps away from postmodernist art traditions by taking craft further a field: obliterating boundaries, dropping stitches, threatening to fall completely off the matrix, off the web, off the loom.

Pressetext

Hanging by a Thread
Kuratoren: Nina Arias, Jose Diaz

mit Ghada Amer, Hope Atherton, Nina Lola Bachhuber, Brian Belott, Cosima von Bonin, Elaine Bradford, Orly Cogan, Rowena Dring, Tracey Emin, Angelo Filomeno, Hanna Fushihara Aron, FriendsWithYou, Jacin Giodano, Danielle Gustafson-Sundell, Kent Henricksen, Christian Holstad, Misaki Kawai, Frankie Martin, Leah Modigliani, Gean Moreno, Mark Newport, Jonathan Pylypchuk, Tal R, Michael Raedecker, Kirstine Roepstorff, Diego Singh, Frances Trombly, William Villalongo, u.a.