‘Tapestries’ at JAYJAY

Modern Digital technology meets traditional craft in Magnolia Editions: Tapestries, an amazing marriage of weft, warp and imagery. Thick, painstakingly woven textiles have been utilized throughout the ages: “The Egyptians and Incas wrapped their dead in them, the Greeks and Romans adorned their homes with them, and later the Europeans draped castle walls with them. When the Jacquard loom was invented two centuries ago, perforated cards were used to direct the weavers to pull up or keep each warp or vertical thread to create an image. Up to 36,000 cards could be perforated for one tapestry, with each time-consuming hole equating one stitch. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, when artists Donald Farnsworth and John Nava, working at the Oakland art press Magnolia Editions, developed a method replacing the time-consuming card weaving with digital technology. After capturing contemporary artist’ work digitally, instructions are fed to the computers in modern Jacquard loom that successfully and beautifully translate the detail, nuance and palette of the original pieces into textiles. The tapestries here are woven at a small family-run mill in Belgium of cotton, viscose, a cellulose-cotton blend, or wool and viscose. And given some the artists behind them- Squeak Carnwath, Bruce Conner, Leon Golub, Mel Ramos, Nancy Spero, William Wiley and Katherine Westerhout-they’re certainly not your typical rugs.

From afar, Golub’s large Reclining Youth offers an atmospheric background with a watercolor like quality. Elsewhere it appears the artist used a heavier hand with the “paint” that was absorbed quickly into the “canvas”. And then there’s an effect that has to be attributed to the viscose in the fabric, a shimmer that’s reminiscent of water’s reflective illusion. But combined together, it’s all very curious, so much that you have to step closer to get the nuances of color and then you can really see it’s woven into the canvas.

While Golub’s piece is painterly, Alan Magee’s pile of rocks in Cairn is so realistic that, again you just have to step closer to really see how the artist did it. It is not a photo impression screened over the canvas, but rather a woven image. Ramos’s Martini Miss, a voluptuous babe in his trademark style, is not a surprise. What is though, is how the loom picked up the graduated shadow of the martini glass stem, and the light source reflecting off the back of the women’s thigh. Spero’s Black and the Red III references Egyptian antiquity with hieroglyphic figures marching across the panel through chambers of light and dark and red. The loom picked up essence of thousands of years of aging the Spero offers, but with a rich depth born under that finely honed computerization of weft and warp. The selection of works here highlighted a range of artistic styles, each translated beautifully into textile and confirming the prescience and precision of Farnsworth and Nava’s union of old and new.

-Saunthy Nicloson-Singh

Artweek, April 2005, Volume 36, issue 3. Reviews, page 16.