Monthly archives: January, 2023

Process Notes: Wendy Wahl

January 25, 2023 0 Comment

Wendy Wahl is one of 10 artists whose work will appear in Papertown, which opens on February 4th at the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts. Wahl is intentional in her work. She takes a broad sociocultural view of the materials she uses and the meanings that can be advanced through art. Wahl has shared with us information about her process, which we, in turn, are sharing with you:

Detail of Re-Seeing by Wendy Wahl
Detail: 42ww Re-Seeing, Wendy Wahl, 1980 World Book pages, wood
40.75″ x 30″ x 2.5″, 2022. Photo by Tom Grotta

In general

“By accident or design, my work is about cycles and the rich layers of meaning that an awareness to these fluctuations provides. These pieces continue an idiosyncratic exploration into who we are and our place in time through the use of materials that belong to a collective consciousness. The purpose of paper has changed yet for over two millennia it has played a significant role in the identity of cultures and the relationship to their environments,” says Wahl. “At the turn of the 21st century I began to view printed paper, particularly encyclopedias, from an elemental standpoint and as a material for expressing the ephemeral and the everlasting. Deconstructing volumes of information to reconstruct the parts through embodied knowledge is cyclical in nature. 

Encyclopedia pages are used as a material in part because as we know the medium can be the message. If these works are considered landscapes they appear to have captured a moment in some metamorphosis the exact context of which is only suggested. Through movement, a meeting of subtle colors and textures, emotions and ideas emerge that seem to represent fundamental spiraling patterns of existence.”

Re-Seeing Encyclopædia page wall art by Wendy Wahl
42ww Re-Seeing, Wendy Wahl, 1980 World Book pages, wood, 40.75″ x 30″ x 2.5″, 2022, Photo by Tom Grotta

On Re-Seeing 

Re-seeing created in 2022 of World Book pages will be exhibited in Papertown at the Fitchburg Museum. It also appeared in Crowdsourcing: a survey of textile and mixed media art at browngrotta arts in 2022. Wahl wrote the following about the work: 

“Crowdsourcing information is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Oxford English Dictionary was one of the first projects to make use of the technique 150 years ago. Today Wikipedia is the default digital encyclopedia. The arrival of the latter is one of the reasons why I began, 17 years ago, to transform the contents of original bound encyclopedias into other forms and meanings creating alternative perspectives. This diptych is composed of 1980 World Book pages. Light, dark, color, hidden text and images emerge from the patterned surface inviting a closer look. The work appears to change as the viewer moves toward and around it encouraging the mind and the senses to notice anew.  Each time I deconstruct a discarded encyclopedia book, I revisit that which has come before, bound in stillness, yet part of the present moment, asking me to re-see in ways that engage my mind, body and spirit.”

Bhavantu Encyclopædia page wall art by Wendy Wahl
40ww Bhavantu, Wendy Wahl, 1962 Encyclopædia Britannica pages, wood, 24″ x 24″ x 3″, 2020, Photo by Tom Grotta

On Bhavantu

Bhanvantu is intriguing in shape and color. Wahl writes about its impetus: “Pushing the chair away and rising from the round table I walk past the open sliding door leading to an outdoor wonderland where my hidden seat awaits behind the banana tree near the fence. Reluctantly I take seven steps away from that view to arrive in front of the built-in shelves where the 1960 something set of Encyclopedia Britannica are held. A through Z ready to be laid open. Collected information, knowledge and experiences offered in printed form. All I could think was: Isn’t everything I need to learn outside? ‘Bring volumes 9 and 17,’ calls the voice from the adjoining room. Decades later, the deconstructed paper from similar volumes feels like home in my hands, or at least my memory of those moments. Removing the pages from their codex can be as jarring as cutting the limbs of a tree. An inward focus directs the spiral parts to be assembled anew as a reminder of the importance of our collective thoughts, words and actions.”  

Encyclopædia page sculptures by Rebound: Mixed Volumnes 3 by Wendy Wahl
20ww Rebound: Mixed Volumes 3, Wendy Wahl, discarded/deconstructed/restructured encylopedia pages, 40″ x 16″ x 17″ ; 50″ x 78″ x 17″ ; 60″ x 95″ x 17″, ; 101.5cm x 40.5cm x 43cm; 127cm x 198cm x 43cm; 152.5cm x 241cm x 43cm, 2009. Photo by Tom Grotta

She explains the title: “The title comes from the last part of the Sanskrit sloka: ‘ Lokah Samastha Sukhino Bhavantu.’ It translates in English, too: may all beings be free and may my thoughts words and actions contribute to that freedom. Bhavantu translates more literally: ‘state of unified existence must be so.'”

Detail of Seeds(of knowledge) WB vol.18/19 Encyclopædia page wall art by Wendy Wahl
26ww Seeds(of knowledge) WB vol.18/19, Wendy Wahl, World Book encyclopedia pages on inked panel, 21.25” x 34.25” x 1.625”, 2011. Photo by Tom Grotta

To see more examples of Wendy Wahl’s work visit our website.

Material Matters: Kibiso Silk

January 18, 2023 0 Comment
Detail of Kiyomi Iwata's Southern Crossing Three
Detail: Kiyomi Iwata’s Southern Crossing Three, woven kibiso and paint, 55” x 108”, 2014. Photo by tom Grotta

Material Matters: Kibiso, Japanese Silk

This is another installment in our series of information on materials used by artists who work with browngrotta arts including horsehair, agave and today, kibiso silk.

Kibiso refers to silk drawn from the outer layer of the silk cocoon, considered “waste” in compared to the smooth filament that makes up the inner cocoon. This thick cocoon layer is also called choshi in Japan, frison in the USA, knubbs in Great Britain, sarnak in India, frissonette in France, and strusa in Italy. In the past, it had been discarded as too tough to loom.

Since 2008, NUNO, the innovative Japanese textile firm, has focused on the use of kibiso. Working with elderly women in Tsuruoka, one of Japan’s last silk-weaving towns, NUNO started a kibiso hand-weaving project. These women set up looms in their garages and kitchens for extra family income, and made woven bags out of the thick, stiff kibiso yarn, as well as handknit hats. NUNO has refined kibiso down to a thickness that allows automatic machine looming, resulting in a whole line of new fabrics, most of which have normal silk warps and kibiso wefts. As part of an effort to revitalize Japan’s once-booming silk trade, NUNO’s head designer, Reiko Sudo, also works with the Tsuruoka Fabric Industry Cooperative on a variety of products under the “kibiso” label.

The fiber is water repellent and UV resistant. Machine-made kibiso yarn was originally produced in Yokohama, writes the Cooper-Hewitt, the center of silk exportation in Japan between the 1860s until the 1920s. This silk waste was considered a high-quality material, and produced good quantities with little waste. However, the industrial process to obtain this fiber was not considered cost-effective and it progressively lost its appeal until Reiko Sudi and NUNO addressed revival of kibiso yarn production. Kibiso comes from about 2% of the silk cocoon, Slow Fiber Studio says. It contains an especially high amount of sericin protein, which means it takes dye very strongly and offers great opportunities to explore body and texture. It’s used in its original, more rigid state, to create sculptural forms, or degummed with soda ash to soften the fibers.

Detail: Fungus Three, Kiyomi Iwata
Detail: Fungus Three, Kiyomi Iwata, Ogara Choshi are gathered. The surface is embellished with gold leaf and French embroidery knots, 6.5″ x 8″ x 7.5″, 2018. Photo by Tom Grotta

Kiyomi Iwata is an artist who has explored the artistic opportunities that kibsio presents. Iwata was born in Kobe, Japan. She immigrated to the US in 1961. She studied at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and the Penland School of Craft. In the 1970s, she and her family relocated to New York City, where she studied at the New School for Social Research and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. She returned to Richmond in 2010 and began working on a body of work using kibiso. She explained to Amanda Dalla Villa Adams in an interview for Sculpture Magazine (“Qualities of the Unsaid: A Coversation with Kiyomi Iwata,” Sculpture Magazine, Amanda Dalla Villa Adams, February 11, 2021) what apealed to her about the material. 

Southern Crossing Three, Kiyomi Iwata
Southern Crossing Three, Kiyomi Iwata, woven Kibiso and paint, 55″ x 108″, 2014. Photo by Tom Grotta

“Kibiso has a very different attraction for me, contrary to my usual silk organza, which is woven from fine silk thread,” Iwata told Adams. The silkworms produce 3,000 meters of thread during their lifetime, and kibiso is the very first 10 meters. “By using kibiso,” the artist says, “I am using the silkworm’s whole life output, which is gratifying. I went back to the traditional manner of using thread to weave. Whatever the thread had from its previous life, such as the silkworm’s cocoon, I left it where it was and dyed the thread.” 

Iwata has made objects of kibiso and also grid-like tapestries which Adams described as apearing as fragments,… “there is an unfinished quality to them,” she writes. “Some are large and freeform, while others are intimate and marked off by a frame.” According to Iwata, the “complex nuance of North versus South” has influenced her work since she re-crossed the Mason-Dixon line. It’s been in the last decade, I that she has transformed woven kibiso made into tapestry-like hangings. “They are either dyed or embellished with gold leaf,” she explains, “and I enjoy the process as much as the results. The whole idea of working, using hands and mind, and letting the process lead me is an eternal moment of joy for me. Sometimes I use a frame to give the piece a limitation, and other times I let the wall space frame the piece. It really is a difference in how I like to present the piece.” In Iwata’s hands, kibiso leads to striking results.

Artist Focus: Lawrence LaBianca

January 11, 2023 0 Comment
Full Stop, Lawrence LaBianca
6ll Full Stop, Lawrence LaBianca, oak, modified trailer winch, cast glass, steel cable, 41″ x 40″ x 13″, 2007

The UN-declared International Year of Glass has just ended, but the many positive attributes of glass deserve to be recognized well into 2023. Among the attributes the UN cataloged are — glass’s role in communication at optical fiber, the fact that it is chemically resistant and used in creating and distributing Covid vaccines, that bioglass can stimulate bone growth and healing, and that glass sheets are used to create solar energy. Of most interest to browngrotta arts, the UN also noted that “Glass artists across the globe have given humankind an awareness of this wonderful material including its remarkable methods of fabrication, inherent beauty, and ability to capture and display nature’s full spectrum of color.”

Wayne Art Center installation of Timeline by Lawrence LaBianca
Wayne Art Center installation of 5ll Timeline by Lawrence LaBianca, walnut ladle, cast glass,steel, 10″ x 48″ x 10″ , 2000

Lawrence LaBianca is one of those artists. He creates glass elements for many of his works, in addition to creating elements of wood and wrought iron and photography. Six of LaBianca’s works are featured in Beyond Glass at the Wayne Art Center in Pennsylvania through January 21, 2023. Beyond Glass, curated by Josephine Shea, gathers artists who choose varied techniques and materials to create work that combines glass with other materials, such as metal, wood, or found objects. Invited from across the United States and beyond, the exhibit also provides a sliver of history, as glass migrated from the factory floor in the early 1960s and returned to the artist’s studio. 

3lb Camphor, Lawrence LaBianca, glass with photo, branch, steel, 12″ x 22″ x 7″, 1999

Among the works of LaBianca’s in Beyond Glass is Camphor. In it the artist has mounted a branch on an iron stand, topped with a piece of glass, into which has been embedded a photographic image of the branch, creating a tool through which the branch can be observed and understood in several different ways. “The tools we apply to nature—to contain it, shape it, understand it and categorize it—also have a profound affect upon it,” LaBianca explains. “It is this impetus to measure, understand, contain and manipulate nature that I enact through my work.”

LaBianca creates tool-forms that explore our relationship with nature through attention to craft, form, physicality, and the fluidity of the boundaries between these ideals. “His work is both abstract and narrative, as the materials with which he works assume new and idiosyncratic identities,” wrote the Virginia A. Groot Foundation in awarding the LaBianca a grant. LaBianca combines natural, organic materials such as wood with manufactured elements to create hybrids. Many of his pieces reference the human body to explore a variety of human emotions. For example, in Full Stop, tree branches and trunks are cut into discs and separated with blown pieces of glass to resemble vertebrae.  The natural sections of this structure appear to be supported and augmented by manufactured glass-like prosthetics.

7ll My Father’s Dream, Lawrence LaBianca, oak, green neon, transformer, cord, 24″ x 96″ x 10″, 2004. Photo by Tom Grotta.

In My Father’s Dream, LaBianca combines a large oak branch with green neon placed in a carved channel inside.  “This work references the dream world with its title and its night-green glow,” wrote Emily Raabe, “but it also implies the act of memory … the way that our memory allows us to hold our observations, emotions, dreams and stories in a state of restless simultaneity; a momentary abeyance that pulses under the force of our own imaginations.” LaBianca agrees about the role of memory.  “Memory leaves an imprint,” he says. “Through time these imprints become makers that provide us with insights of where we have been and once pieced together show us our path.”

The artist explains that My Father’s Dream was influenced by a memory of his fathers adaptation of our suburban home with the addition of a wood stove during the 70’s oil crisis. “During this time my dad would wake us up, very early, to collect wood that fell into our neighbors yards during ice storms. Our family station wagon could fit several limbs. These limbs needed to be of a certain length and of a certain wood which would optimize our outings. The limb used for My Father’s Dream is the optimal length, weight and fuel for such an outing.” 

For more examples of work by Lawrence LaBianca, a “blacksmith of the 21st century,” visit our website.

browngrotta arts Year in Review/Preview

January 4, 2023 0 Comment

Hi all!
We like to take a look back most Januarys. We make plans, and, more optimistically, resolutions for the New Year.

This year has been a busy one for us and next year is shaping up to be busier still! 

Below, a look back and  a look ahead for browngrotta arts. Hope you’ll add some of our upcoming activities to your schedule.

Exhibitions

Opening reception for crowdsourcing the Collective
Crowdsourcing the Collective exhibition. Photo by Ezco Productions

2022 
• More than 500 people attended our 2022 Exhibitions, Crowdsourcing the Collective: a survey of textiles and mixed media and Allies for Art: Art from NATO-related countries.

• After the in-person exhibitions ended, we posted the work on Artsy as exclusive on-line collections.

• We curated a Viewing Room in March. Featuring works in frames, it was entitled Art With an Edge: The Case for Frames.

Tom installing The Station/Kuala Lampur for our Upcoming Glen Kaufman Viewing Room exhibition. Photo by Rhonda Brown

2023
• We’ll host two in-person exhibitions next year, one in the Spring and one in the Fall. Add the Spring exhibition dates to your calendar now: April 29 – May 7, 2023

• We’ll be involved with three exhibitions at public spaces. We’ve loaned work to Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul at the Fairfield University Art Museum in Connecticut, which opens January 27th and will loan several indigo works to the Denver Botanic Garden in Colorado for an exhibition that opens July 1st and we’ve partnered with the Flinn Gallery, Greenwich Public Library, Connecticut for Wordplay: Messages in Branches and Bark, which opens on March 30th. 

• We’ll present an online exhibition of the late Glen Kaufman’s work, Glen Kaufman: 1960-2010  in our Viewing Room on our new website.

• We will curate at least one other 2023 on-line exclusive exhibition in the View Room on the new website. Topic TBD.

Outreach

James Bassler Two Flags video

2022 Social Media:
• We have continued to post regularly on our social channels, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and our blog, arttextstyle. We’ve upped the amount of information we provide on Instagram and you’ve responded by engaging with us more.

• Our Instagram impressions are up 13.5%, engagements 12.6% and Instagram video views up 16.9%

• Our Facebook Engagements are up 32.1%  

• Page views on arttextstyle increased by 15%

• Our Instagram Net Follower Growth has grown 90.5%

• Our Total Net Audience has Grown 46%

2023 Social Media and Live Programs:
• We’ll continue our social media postings on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and arttextstyle, which will move to our new website when it launches.

• Gyöngy Laky and John McQueen will each speak on different dates at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich in April in conjunction with the Wordplay: Messages in Bark and Branches exhibition that features their work. Tom will also speak at the Flinn during the Wordplay exhibition. More on dates and times to come.

• Tom will speak at the Ridgefield Library on Contemporary Art Textiles and Fiber Art on Sunday, April 16, at 2 pm and also at the Appraisers Association of America meeting in NYC in June.

Publications

Gyöngy Laky: Screwing with Order, assembled art, actions and creative practice; Allies for Art: Work from NATO-related countries; Crowdsourcing the Collective: a survey of textiles and mixed media art
Gyöngy Laky: Screwing with Order, assembled art, actions and creative practice; Allies for Art: Work from NATO-related countries; Crowdsourcing the Collective: a survey of textiles and mixed media art catalogs

2022
• We were pleased at the publication of Gyöngy Laky: Screwing with Order, assembled art, actions and creative practice, this Spring. It was designed by Tom features text by Jim Melchert, Mija Reidel and David M. Roth. You can buy it on our website and in the MoMA book store, among other outlets.

• We published a 148-page, color catalog for our Crowdsourcing the Collective exhibition.

• We published a 148-page, color catalog for our Allies for Art exhibition.

2023
• In early 2023, we will make available our fifth monograph, Glen Kaufman: 1960 – 2010.

• On March 15th Anne Newlands authoritative book on noted Canadian artist Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, Weaving Modernist Art: The Life and Work of Mariette Rousseau-Vermette will be published. It features many of Tom’s photos of Mariette’s work. We hope to make it available in the browngrotta arts’ site.

• We will publish a color catalog for our Spring “Art in the Barn” exhibition in April 2024.

• We will publish a color catalog for our Fall “Art in the Barn” exhibition in September-October 2023.

External Platforms

Artsy viewing room and 1stdibs browngrotta arts page
Artsy and 1stdibs

2022
• Art from browngrotta arts could be found on 1stDibs and Artsy in 2022. We created our first Artsy Viewing Room to showcase the work of Wendy Wahl and Norma Minkowitz, then-included in the Westport Museum of Contemporary Art Exhibition, Women Pulling at the Threads of Social Discourse, in Connecticut. Artsy included Yasuhisa Kohyama in its article: 5 Artists on Our Radar in June.

2023
• Art from browngrotta arts will again be found on 1stDibs and Artsy in 2023. We’ll be adding videos on Artsy to give viewers even more information about available works.

Please join us. We’d love to see our views grow in 2023.