Elevating Contemporary Artists.
Elevating Contemporary Artists.
“Only through our awareness of change and the possibility of loss can something like awareness of cultural heritage grow up. So there is no cultural heritage without the non-place.”
Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude
Marking Time, Shifting Space is an exhibit consisting of a large scale fiber installation and new fiber artworks indicating an evolution in recent textile works by artist Victoria Manganiello. Referencing the manual presence the artist exerts throughout the hands-on process of creating fiber artworks, Marking Time, Shifting Space reveals the artist’s process of exercising control over the physical threads while also pointing to the reclamation of manual labor in a post-Industrial society and the recognition of textile arts as both a continued cultural heritage tradition and modern, experimental art form. Continuing the experimental precedent set by artists Sheila Hicks and Fransje Killars, Manganiello invigorates hand-spun and dyed fabrics with creations that evince abstract dynamism and lyrical composition. By both revealing and obstructing the artist’s hand throughout the process of weaving on a hand loom, a long and laborious process which the artist shows is open to improvisation and intuitive re-arranging, these works implicate the structural hierarchies complicit both in the artist’s role as narrator of a woven text and the relative place of textile art within the art world pantheon as a whole. Manganiello deftly explores the physical spaces omitted within the weaving of the textile, hinting at historical revisionism while showing the power of control the artist wields on pattern and composition in fiber artworks. By opening a new space for dialogue through overt lapses in space and time, Manganiello subverts our expectations of fiber, revealing it as a medium open to creative experimentation.