FIBER 94: NEW CRITICAL ATTITUDES
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How, you may ask, does a video end up in a fiber-art show? If nothing else it’s a sign that the boundaries between visual-arts media continue to blur. Many of the works in “Fiber 94”–juried by Anne Wilson, a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago–could as easily fit into a show of sculpture or installation art. The inclusion of Lentz’s videos and other works only marginally constructed of fiber suggests that for some contemporary fiber artists textile-related concepts are more important than textiles themselves.
Some of the 18 artists in the show (7 are from Chicago) put quilting, weaving, and basketry to unexpected uses, while others employ such nontraditional materials as aluminum screening, panty hose, and bubble wrap. Many, like Lentz in her videos, are concerned with the body–how we clothe it, shape it, protect it, and hide it. In an untitled work Nancy Morton encases a freestanding, life-size cement figure in a wide roll of bubble wrap; all we see are the top of the head and two thin ankles and feet, turned slightly inward and buried in a low mound of dirt. Protected so thoroughly that virtually every sign of individuality remains hidden, Morton’s figure is unknowable, as inert and alienated as the figures that populated George Tooker’s bleak paintings of the 50s and 60s.
The unassuming stars of “Fiber 94” are Jiro Yonezawa’s three bamboo baskets, which inject a welcome dose of poetry into a show that favors issue-oriented work. Each takes a similar form: a narrow, slightly curved tube rises a few feet from a loosely woven, nestlike base. Their odd proportions make them slightly awkward, even humorous, yet like just-sprouted seedlings their gestures are sure and graceful. Proving that craft can still be vital, Yonezawa’s delicate baskets easily hold their own amid their more clamorous experimental neighbors.
