Monthly Archives: March 2012

Shagging – Kathryn Pannepacker at William Way LGBT Community Center

Shagging – Shagging – Kathryn Pannepacker at William Way LGBT Community Center

DoN asked Kathryn Pannepackerr about the title of her fiber arts show at the William Way LGBT Community Center at 1315 Spruce Street called Shagging, what’s it mean? “Get your jiggy on! The title I started with was much too long, it was called Shag Tagging Graffiti Art for All, it was just too wordy, so I kind of just broke it down to the essence, Shagging. So, you know, working with fibers, a lot of texture, real simple knotting, kind of like shag rugs, my whimsical, funny, playful side, the sexy side of shagging.” So it is a double entendre like rolling around on the rug? “Well, it’s good to know that under it is chain link fence.” Another metaphor? “In a way, yeah. A lot of this work came from doing a lot of guerilla work outside on chain link fences around abandoned lots around the city. Just wanting to bring art outside for everybody, so that it’s really accessible for anyone.”

Shagging – Kathryn Pannepacker at William Way LGBT Community Center

“I’ve been known to go around and tag, make little checker boards or little, beautiful ditties, on fences and gates throughout many years. But, the last year or two in particular mostly on chain link fences. So, I got this idea, why not get a huge roll of chain link fence at Home Depot? You have to get it on line, and like an eighty pound order came, a huge roll, the idea was just to break it up and start doing huge wall pieces that I would exhibit in museums and galleries with the thought of art outside for everybody or art inside, sort of merge the two. Inside/outside. The other thing was I wanted to do large abstract painting-like pieces that were all about color and shape. Sort of like intuitive, quick and expressive.”

What do you mean quick? “Well, there’s nothing quick about textiles so I guess in a way it’s a funny way to think of it, but, it’s really just getting the juncture at the link of the fence and tying a knot and cutting it long enough so that it’s a shaggy knot.”

Shagging – Kathryn Pannepacker at William Way LGBT Community Center

“But, quick in the sense of, the background study that I have with with very detailed French tapestry which is pictorial flat weave, hyper-intensive timing, this was doing my own designs, simple forms and shapes, abstract, painterly-like, so, even though there’s nothing real quick about it, it’s certainly quicker than flat weave tapestry.”

DoN asked, “How do you do it? Is it hanging on the wall or do you just lay on the floor?” Kathryn Pannepacker replied, “No, I actually would hang it between a door frame or I’ve got those pipe looms, like a coat rack, or something like that, so I just hang it from there. The other thing is that people are always giving me yarns, it’s sort of like an ongoing thing. It’s kind of like a joke, that when I run out of yarn, I’m going to change careers because I’ve got this idea in my head that it should be OK that everyone changes careers at least three times in life, that should be a cultural given. Like at one point in time I would have liked to be a farmer or sell flowers on the corner. But I think when I run out of yarn I’ll switch careers but people keep giving yarn, so I’ve got more work to make.”

Shagging – Kathryn Pannepacker at William Way LGBT Community Center

At this point in our conversation a group of students entered the gallery and DoN followed around while Kathryn Pannepacker described the work. “Many of these pieces are done by homeless men and women or people in recovery, so we would use the pellum fabric, to ask lead-in questions like, ‘What does home mean to you?’ So, they would write their comments into the weave and add that to the fencing. The fabric is called pellum, a non-woven interfacing that a tailor might use inside of a coat. And the beauty of working with this material is that after they would write and tie a knoe you don’t necessarily read the message on it. So, it’s a nice opportunity for folks to share their thoughts and feelings but if they want to keep it private they can keep it private. So, in some of the cases they wanted to share their thoughts, so, I also recorded on a paper a list that writes it all out, like blessings, and prayers, poems and words of advice or things they’re looking forward to.”

Shagging – Kathryn Pannepacker at William Way LGBT Community Center

“What gave me the idea was for a number of years I’ve been doing little weavings between fences and gates around the city, in fact, I was doing little ditty weavings between fences and gates wherever I would travel around the world and it would be a way of leaving a popcorn trail of what I was doing. So, then I started to use chain link fences around abandoned lots around the city because, around different neighborhoods where I was living, it was so depressing, I just wanted to add some color and life to that abandoned lot. I would do large, or smallish it didn’t matter, but like shags, colorful checker boards or whatever and the idea came from that and what would it take to bring that into a gallery. You might find yourself, you know, you work so much in your studio, then we work in a classroom situation, you need your own time to feed yourself or refuel. So I was like,’What’s the good link between what I’m doing in the community but also that going to inform my own personal work?”

Shagging – Kathryn Pannepacker at William Way LGBT Community Center

“In fifth grade we were introduced to macrame and we were making plant hangers with macrame and so immediately after that I was doing these like wall pieces with macrame knot but then I got into latch hooking and all that, so I love all that.”

Professor of Fibers at Tyler School of Art, Pazia Mannella, was with the group of students, so DoN took the opportunity to ask her feelings about FiberPhiladelphia 2012? “I think it’s just amazing, especially someone who works in textiles and fibers, it’s so exciting to see so many examples of textile work and fiber arts work and really ranging from very traditional to experimental installation. I was at all the opening events and it’s an amazing community that is in Philadelphia.” DoN asked Professor Mannella about the political discussion surrounding women at this time and how fiber is often associated with women and her opinion of the political attack on women? “Well, I do think historically fibers has been linked with women and I think that it’s important that the voices are heard within this political realm. And that’s been kind of the issue with it being predominately men commenting on the health of women. I think that both men and women can react to a range of issues through fiber work.”

DoN commented that men seem to forget that women are taking care of business – the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the homes we live in, are often made possible by women. Professor Mannella replied, “We’re really trying to increase our enrollment of men in our area, we have a male major, and we’ve had male majors in the past, but I think there has been a bit of a stigma with the word ‘fibers’ among, at least, the men, the male student population, in my experience. But I think it’s interesting, some of the men that are taking our classes that are in their early twenties, they seem less affected by these gender debates, it’s just like there’s a difference among these young men, especially the ones in our class, they have a different point of view and they have respect for this craft and don’t feel stigmatized by it as a woman’s art. So, it’s great to see all genders working with this technique.”

Shagging – Kathryn Pannepacker at William Way LGBT Community Center

Kathryn Pannepacker said to DoN, “I have this funny way of just using up yarn, just shagging, being textural and fun.” The art in the William Way LGBT Community Center shows influences of Mondrian and Klee, DoN wondered if this was fulfilling a need to paint? “Well, I do paint, but I don’t paint like this, I tend to paint more, sort of, art naive Matisse-like, paintings that might be narrative in a way or self portraits. I think of me rolling a ball of yarn looking at my easel, like will you take me back when I’m ready to start painting again? Because sometimes I get real affixed with weaving and then I shift over to a mural project or a painting project or get real intensely focussed with my time in community work.”

Shagging – Kathryn Pannepacker at William Way LGBT Community Center

“I wanted to share this with you, I’ve got this way of thinking, that may be a little nutsy at times, that you can’t call yourself an artist unless you’re making artwork. The whole idea of really taking care of yourself in the studio and making sure you have enough of solitude time in the studio. This work here, and the garland that’s outside the door is all part of the one-a-day series that I did. When I get really intensely focussed on a project and I get back home in the studio, I like to do a one-a-day or something that’s going to bring me to my own series of exploration – color, texture…”

Shagging – Kathryn Pannepacker at William Way LGBT Community Center

“I got the good news about the Leeway Foundation grant, I wanted to start on my website, slowly, slowly, a blog charting the process of how I’m spending my time and what I’m doing. I have all these great ideas but for now it’s a little now and then.”

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer

Thread of Thought, Tara O’Brien Artist’s Talk at CFEVA

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Thread of Thought, Tara O’Brien at CFEVA

“I came to book arts as a librarian’s daughter and my poor father practically had a heart attack when he found out I was applying to grad school to do book arts. ‘Those are those nut jobs that take books and nail them to canvasses and call them art.'” said Tara O’Brien during her artist talk at The Center for Emerging Visual Artists. “A lot of what I was dealing with in Graduate School was making sure that that’s not what I’m doing, I’m not desecrating the Book. In fact, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is the future of the book, where is it going? In 2003 we were just getting into a huge tipping point with the Internet and you went there instead of to a book, unless you were my father. A lot of that time was spent thinking, ‘What is a book? What can it be? What’s the conceptual quality of the book?’ And so for the early pieces in the show, these two Thread of Thought and Plenum in the back is what could it be?”

Thread of Thought, Tara O’Brien at CFEVA

“Plenum, for example, is a term physicists use to describe all of the matter in the universe. So, what is a book, what can it be? It can be anything in the Universe. As I was talking earlier about Plenum the other thing I wanted you to do is approach the book when it was closed and when you open it it reveals a completely different structure inside, a surprise in finding a book. Which is what you get when you approach a novel and find that that stellar writing you kind of think, ‘Oh, they wrote that so beautifully.’ So, how can you combine the two in art and literature? How does a book work physically? How do you read a book page by page and how do you follow the threads of what the author is trying to get through to you? And then you can break it down to how are the symbols on the page giving you this linking. And that’s why I chose crocheting instead of knitting because each chain in a crochet is a link from one to the next one but you can build so much from a crochet chain. Both of these books are a single thread all the way through the entire book, the whole narrative, if you will, from the thread references as a you read a book. Like when you’ve gone fifty pages and and you don’t remember turning a single page because you’ve gotten so caught up in this single thread.”

Thread of Thought, Tara O’Brien at CFEVA, Hyperbolic Space

“Or you get to the point in a book here where you do realize your turning pages faster than you think.” Tara demonstrated how many of the pages pull the others with the thread and pages fly by like a magicians deck of cards. “And finally you almost turn in junior English denouement. So those books lead to thinking metaphysically, ‘What is the future of the book?’ I have no idea. Do I think books are going out of style? No. Not a chance, they just have a chance to evolve now. We’ve got eReaders, they’re here to stay, have fun with them but come back to these. The next group is the little tiny ones they all fall under the title Entelechy, Aristotle’s philosophy that every entity has a force that drives it to self-fulfillment and I just really like that idea. I’d like to know what this force is? What is it made up of? How does it break down? And in making these books I found that opening a page spread in a book is also kind of a metaphor for life.”

Thread of Thought, Tara O’Brien at CFEVA

“If you do these stitches you can see the full spread of a chapter or a moment to a link in your life. For example, as of now, all of February is one page spread for me, I don’t know what’s happening right now in this page spread but I can turn the page back in time and look at what happened in February in my life, and it’s clear now. Whereas in February I had no idea. A little crazy, right? I was really excited about this show because it offered me a chance to do new work. I do a lot of knitting, a lot of crocheting and I’m interested in a lot of things, I’m a library conservator so I get to look at a lot of old stuff, at ancient patterns and I get to look at old cookbooks and all these things that people have been doing forever. How are we going to interpret it?”

“My Winter project this year was to knit a pair of Latvian mittens, in Latvian culture for years and years and years the girls know they will marry at age sixteen and they make these incredibly complex mittens, one pair for every member of the family of her future husband. So, she’s been knitting five hundred pairs of mittens by the time she’s sixteen. They’re complex and double stranded and they start knitting when they’re five years old, it’s part of the culture.”

“Fast forward to 1995, and we have a mathematician from Latvia who finally solves the problem of making a model for hyperbolic space. So, what’s hyperbolic space? Well I’m going to do my best, but, it’s a mathematical thing – continuously negative space. It’s the ruffles on your lettuce, and what she was able to do was disprove Euclid’s theorum, given one straight line and a point off of the line there is only one other parallel line only. But this theorum doesn’t work on a globe but nobody could prove how it didn’t work and why not? In the 50’s they started experimenting with paper models but paper if you cut it, it falls apart.”

“So this person from a knitting culture sat down and said, ‘I know how to do this.’ And so she took these specifically exponentially increased, this one is six to one, you can see these two lines, when you take this continuously negative space and fold it you can bring two lines together and you get a set of parallel lines. As you go on with these, it takes forever to make a row, and then you take another fold and lay it next to that and now you have three parallel lines.

So, this is important for me because it references back to my idea of linking and connecting everything, here’s a woman who just knitted all the time because she was so practiced at it, all of a sudden these higher level ideas were coming out her just regular handwork and solving really massive problems. This book talks about the connection of this handwork from just the regular linking these little moments, these tiny little pearls of brilliant thoughts and made some coherence out of these higher thoughts. I hope that that makes sense.”

Fiber Philadelphia 2012

Thread of Thought at Center for Emerging Visual Artists through March 23rd.

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer, DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog Google and Wikipedia was used extensively to write this article.

Read more about FiberPhiladelphia2012 at Side Arts with Cassandra Hoo‘s excellent article.

[disclosure page] All ad links in this blog post go to Amazon.com

Thread of Thought, Leslie Atik Artist’s Talk at CFEVA

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Leslie Atik, Notes on a Rose, hand painted marking tags, map pins, chalk and paint

“It’s exciting to be here, I want to thank Amie Potsic for her curatorial vision and bringing Tara O’Brien and me together for this exciting project.” said Leslie Atik at the opening of Thread of Thought at Center for Emerging Visual Artists. “I want to tell you a little about my work, it really grows out of my love of language, that’s the first place it starts. I love language and grammar, I’m one of those people who like to diagram sentences and I like conjugating verbs and all that sort of stuff. It took me a long tome, believe me, to get here but I finally got to the point where I wanted to make that the stuff of my artwork. So, that’s the beginning place and the thing that I really love is thread and anything to do with thread. Textile people out there understand that, if you like to knit or crochet or weave, I started realizing and not in a linear way but there are a lot of things that overlap when you talk about language and you talk about textiles. There are a lot of metaphors of textiles that are used in describing language but at a basic level when you talk about language you talk about surface and a structure that generates that surface. And that’s something that language shares with textile, so, when I’m talking about structure I mean the grammar, how the sentence is put together, not neccessarily what it means. That obviously is a layer of it, the underneath part is what interests me in textiles, too. So, those units make up the surface – I could talk forever about that stuff.”

Leslie Atik, Notes on a Rose, hand painted marking tags, map pins, chalk and paint

“Fast forward, the other thing that may be of biographical interest is I taught Spanish for many years and so I was at the blackboard back in the day when you actually stood at the blackboard with a piece of chalk. And I realized that something else I wanted to bring into my art making was, I thought, ‘Well, Jeez, this is mark-making’, and I worked at bringing my chalkboard into my work. It’s a linear fashion I’m describing but this is what happened.”

Notes on a Rose, Leslie Atik at Center for Emerging Visual Artists

This piece is called Notes on a Rose, it’s a series of pieces that are similar to this and what I’m doing is marking the language. But each one is different, I’ve marked different things, I’ve structured them differently. And I thank Amie because any time I can work directly on the wall it really excites me. I like the idea that at the end of this exhibition this piece is going to be erased. It has that temporal element to it…it’s built on two texts, the middle text is from Romeo and Juliet and it’s the famous scene where Juliet is asking, ‘Why is your name Romeo?‘ That which we call a rose by any other name would smell so sweet. The middle passage is about names, therefore in the grammar I immediately thought of nouns – names and nouns. So I marked – all these patterns are marking places in the grammar where there were nouns – the little tags that I buy at Staples are called marking tags. So I’m literally marking the language and I’m mapping them because I’m using little map pins on the placement as well. Each of these little tags has been hand painted in watercolor.”

“The text on either side is a little excerpt from Gertrude Stein‘s writing, A Rose is a Rose. So I just repeated it over and over and to me that seemed like a textile to repeat that unit, A Rose is a Rose, and on this side I marked the vowels that repeat and on that side is the consonants. There’s another piece around the side there that’s based on a play and the one over there is based on Spanish, those who speak Spanish know there are two types of being to express the verbs ‘to be’ in Spanish, one referring to the state of things which is the outside and the other one is more essential kind of being. That’s basically the idea that helped me structure that piece.”

Leslie Atik at Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Dream Notes, hand painted marking tags, map pins, chalk and paint

“When I talk about different layers of language sometime I don’t just use the black and white because this rose idea was so strong I said, ‘OK, let’s just have fun with the color rose.’ I just used the idea of the rose and made that the color palette. The tags I just paint by the hundreds. The surface on the wall is just house paint, interior latex paint, right on the wall. If you come around to the side this is one of my favorite views of the piece, I really am playing with the idea of the text in the textile, so the idea here is that a text is generating textiles. The erasing is purposeful, it’s kind of developed through my work, to create this piece I do a lot of work at home first getting my handwriting to do what I want it to do in the space I want to work in. But I like erasing for formal reasons, I like the graying that it adds to my palette but also because I like the idea that this thing is ephemeral and that you’re writing and re-writing and the idea of repeating which is part of the textile process and part of the language process as well. It is fragile, but I’ve lived with some of these and as long as they’re not mishandled they hold up pretty well but they’re not meant to last for a long time.”

Fiber Philadelphia 2012

Thread of Thought at Center for Emerging Visual Artists through March 23rd.

Read more about FiberPhiladelphia2012 at Side Arts with Cassandra Hoo‘s excellent article.

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer, DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog

[disclosure page] All ad links in this blog post go to Amazon.com

Bob Bruhin at Cafe Twelve – Images from Eraserhood

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Bob Bruhin at Cafe Twelve – Images from Eraserhood

The Photographic Society of Philadelphia‘s current solo show is photographer and blogger Bob Bruhin, at the reception in the comfy Cafe Twelve, 212 S. 12th Street, Bob explained to a group of society members his collection of photographs. “This is a small selection that I call Images from the Eraserhood, it’s photos that were taken originally for my blog eraserhood.com, which is discussing the neighborhood North of Vine Street, South of Spring Garden Street, East of Broad Street and West of 7th or 8th depending on how you determine it. It’s an historically industrial neighborhood that used to have the Reading Railroad running through it, there a big old thing called the Reading Viaduct which was where the railroad ran before they built commuter tunnels. It’s filled with old industrial properties, beautiful stunning buildings. In the mid to late 60’s the artist David Lynch lived there, he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy and the geography and the look and the tone of that neighborhood of that time inspired his first feature film entitled Eraserhead (Import, All Regions). So recently as the neighborhood has developed it’s taken on the name Eraserhood, it kind of stuck to the neighborhood,”

Bob Bruhin at Cafe Twelve – Images from Eraserhood

“All that fascinated me when I came to work there, I work in a building called the Wolf Building which is an emblem of the factories and condos and offices and apartments, all manner of things. Rick Wright has his studio in that building. At the time I was originally photographing only using a cell phone, so what I was doing was taking composite images panoramically, specifically to build up a large enough image to make it worth the trouble. Eventually I found it amusing enough that I started to use a real small Nikon point and shoot, a simple Nikon Coolpix L20 10MP Digital Camera. But since I became addicted to the panoramic process at that point, I continued to do that and started building larger images, I worked with exposure stacking and high dynamic range to intensify the color and textures of the images.”

Bob Bruhin at Cafe Twelve – Images from Eraserhood

“So it’s kind of an historical study but it’s supposed to be a bit of a twisted historical study just because of the twisted history of the neighborhood, the tone of David Lynch‘s work kind of inspired that. I was further inspired by the fact that it is now a National Historic Landmark called the Callowhill Historic District which has all of these buildings in this show are from the Callowhill Historic District set…these have all been done with the panoramic process and have been enhanced with exposure stacking and high dynamic range. I bracket all my exposures and combine them digitally at the end wih a more even exposure and also to capture all the texture that I can possibly capture.”

All photographs courtesy of the artist, Bob Bruhin:
– http://bob-bruhin.com/
– http://eraserhood.com/
– http://LandMarrx.com/
Read other reviews of PSoP photographer Karen Schlechter on DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog and Jeff Stroud on Side Arts Philadelphia Art Blog