Two Textiles

Although I know it isn’t so, the word textile connotes a daintiness. Saying that word, we can imagine how our manly precursors could dismiss with snort these “womanly arts” or with a simple cough “craft.” But oh, this connotation is not so.

 Piercing tissue, cutting fabric, tearing seams give these works an underlying violence. Two pieces, Ian Cooper’s “Aren’t You” at the Cue space and Kimberely Hart’s “”Whimper” at Mixed Greens, reveal this inherent violence.

 

Cooper’s “Aren’t You” is faux violence and teddy bear horror. It is a delightful monstrosity echoing horror movies and urban legends. But the softness of the material softens the horror, but in doing so makes it more horrible. Felt “blood” letters seem to make us accept the implied physical violence. Just as the mirrored denim fails to reflect the red felt blurs fails to horrify. And we become complicit and eager to accept a certain darkness.

 

 

Hart’s needlepoint “Whimper” has the double threat of antique femininity and violence. The limp, broken rabbit and the fluid and dynamic blood pool-dynamic are more insistent in our acknowledging the violence. The needlepoint seems to push the violence further into the imagined past. But the presence of the carcass, instead of just the traces in the image, gives us the immediacy of pathos instead of energetic plush fabrication.