Lou Cabeen: Mapping Desire
Labor I Meditation began as a large white tablecloth, with a white damask leaf design. Cabeen burned circular brown marks into the fabric with an electric range, a slightly mordant reference to cooking, that disrupt the fabric’s clean white surface. She stitched into the center a traditional Christian prayer, replacing the word “Christ” with “labor”– “Labor is the foundation of this home the unrecognized source of every meal.” One barely notices the white-on-white design in the original fabric; like so much traditional household decor, it has a gentle, effacing quality. While the burn marks are jarring, it’s the white text that gives the piece its edge. Like the leaf design, it’s almost buried in the fabric of the white cloth, requiring a little work to read. Housework, central to every home, is an often thankless job; the near invisibility of the words becomes a bitter reference to the lack of recognition accorded to “women’s work.”
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Here Cabeen goes beyond gender-specific issues to seek alternative ways of seeing and thinking. For all their evenness, northern Renaissance paintings still have focal points and one or two clear concepts. What’s wonderful about Cabeen’s La Fioretti II is its spatial multidirectionality and profusion of themes. It’s stitched together from different maps of Seattle and the Chicago area placed upright, upside down, and diagonally, giving no location or direction or orientation priority over another. At its center is a hand-colored picture of a heart that was photocopied from a science poster. Different colored threads emerge from the heart and form a network that suggests, without looking like, the human circulatory system. Over this network is printed a complex circular maze with a single, though twisted, route to its center.
