A scrim (mesh fabric) is a lightweight, open-weave fabric used primarily in theatrical performances and veils. Depending on the lighting, the scrim can be visible or invisible, and it often serves as reinforcement for repairing damaged fabrics. Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby wrote “Always Thinking Like A Scrim”1, and just as a scrim can be both visible and invisible, depending on the lighting, our experience of the world is shaped by multiple, often overlapping facets. Think of palimpsestic support, folds that hold.
For this folding show, Shimmer explores the life cycle of textiles, and through the action of making we enter into the deep. Textiles speak a language that crosses cultures, but also goes underneath them, providing opportunities to talk about things that you can not say in any other medium. From the pollution caused by the mass consumption of textiles, to the canvas stretched as an image, from the swaddling cloth in which we are wrapped at birth, to the clothes we choose to be buried in, we see textile as barometers of our lives.
We are inspired by textile and the rhythm of layering found in the many works that you will see over the course of two exhibitions. These two layers, the two parts of this exhibition, are interfaced by early works by Hana Miletic titled Materials. Interfacing just like the scrim, repairs and gives structure to fabric, yet still remains flexible to movement.
These early works by Miletic are recreations of real world encounters of daily and quick repair, such as a side-view car mirror wrapped back together with silver ducttape. The artist’s photographic eye for detail is found in the selection of silver and gray threads to indicate the dulling sheen of duct-tapes and by the artwork’s height on the wall. 90cm from the ground is the height of the car-side mirror or a car window, for example. In these works, Miletic weaves reflections on the social and cultural realities in which the artist herself works.
The eye for detail is also found in the practice of Matt Hinkley, whose new work is presented alongside Miletic. Diaphanous line meet diaphanous line responding to the work’s own inner world. The graphite drawings ripples like the beloved 18th century silk moire ribbon. The smallest of waves, it was after all, one of the rarest grosgrain ribbons in French silk production, prized for their liquid ‘undoing’. Working on the minute scale, Hinkley’s works are made slowly and need to be met with equal attention. The drawings movement ripples like lace, or turns like a thermohygrograph, changing with each piece. The series has been made with the port’s view in mind, protected by the aftergrowth of industrial material, a glimpse, before slipping underneath the surface.
Later in the exhibition enters Touch Me (2019) by Liz Magor. Held in spaces between transparency and opacity of fragile mylar boxes are a pair of fluffy boots, a length of tulle, a wolf’s mask, eyes of a teddy bear, a picture of Mick Jagger. Known for giving new life to found objects, Magor pairs unlikely material bedfellows, recasting gloves in porcelain, and rehousing soft toys on cardboard pedestals, finding new paths for the overflow of rejected objects of affection from our consumptive material lives.
In June the exhibition changes with works by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Cihad Caner, Daniel Giles, Lotus Laurie Kang, Tenant of Culture, and different work by Hana Miletic (part 2).
