In "The Scout," Mark Newport sits astride a white horse, looking out over a distant freeway. He is clothed in a superhero costume that he has knitted for himself. The photograph, and the costume shown in it, "Rawhide Kid", are two of the works featured in "Unknitting: Challenging Textile Traditions" on display at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts from April 10–Aug. 2. Responding in part to a renewed national interest in knitting, where it is no longer uncommon to find co-ed groups of hipsters knitting together in big city bars and coffee shops, co-curators Kate Bonansinga, Director of the Rubin Center, and Stephanie L. Taylor, Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at New Mexico State University, have put together an exhibition that seeks to disturb our concepts of knitting as a purely feminine activity that takes place only in the domestic sphere.
“Knitting is seen as something that is done inside by old women. But the four artists chosen for the show are knitting outside rather than inside, they use knitting and textiles as public performance or use new media (video, digital photography) to capture knitting practice,” says Taylor. Mark Newport knits superhero costumes for himself and uses the costumes and related themes in a series of performances and prints. The superhero costumes hang limp on the gallery walls, and they seem amusingly impotent in the face of any serious threat. Newport’s knitting plays with gender roles, but also with a very contemporary American dilemma, our fundamental helplessness as we face mounting peril in a rapidly changing world. In his prints, he shows a cartoon version of himself, vulnerable and naked, knitting furiously in the face of danger. British artist Rachel Gomme uses knitting not as a craft form, but rather as part of an art process that is grounded in performance. "Ravel" is a video documentation of a performance piece in which Gomme walked through the streets of the city of Camberwell in England, leaving a trail of yarn in her path that connected important sites in the neighborhood. She then followed the trail back, knitting up the yarn and embedding found objects and offerings from bystanders into the piece. Her work exists in the gallery space both as video documentation and as knit artifacts of her performance pieces, some of which are ongoing. Both Newport and Gomme will do performances during the opening week of the exhibition.
New York based artist and photographer Sandra Valenzuela commissions knitted pieces from her native Mexico City. She then uses those pieces to dress up fruits and vegetables that are arranged into surreal photographs. The photographs included in "Unknitting" are from a series entitled "Media Noche," a play on words meaning both “midnight” and “night of the stockings.” El Paso artist Adrian Esparza will create two large scale, site-specific works for the show. Esparza does not knit but has worked extensively in textile-based pieces in which he deconstructs the kind of cheap Mexican serapes sold to tourists in the Juarez market, and uses their threads to make ethereal, geometric constructions. He has a history of playing with both gender and border identity in his work, and will use textiles to create architectural scale pieces in the gallery spaces.
Taylor and Bonansinga both point to a national interest in craft as a fine art, noting large-scale survey exhibitions like last summer’s "Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting" at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. But Bonansinga also notes that in general, contemporary art museums still shy away from showing artists working in traditional craft mediums, while museums that showcase fine craft create shows that are medium-driven, often giving only passing attention to the ideas and concepts behind the artists work. “By giving in depth attention to the concepts and ideas of a small group of artists working in craft-based media, the Rubin Center is developing a unique voice nationally,” says Bonansinga, “With shows like 'Unknitting' we play a distinctive role in bridging the gap between contemporary art and fine craft.”
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Kerry Doyle is assistant director of the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts.
