Next month, Rhode Island-based artist Wendy Wahl will exhibit branches, an imposing interactive sculpture constructed from discarded and deconstructed Encyclopedia Britannicas inside the Park Avenue Armory in New York for the Sculpture, Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) exposition. From April 15th through the 19th, branches will flank SOFA’s entrance inside the Armory and stand approximately nine-feet high, six-feet deep, and eleven-feet wide. Viewers will be encouraged to move through the sculpture, whose form and materials will serve as a contemporary reflection on the ancient idea of the Tree of Knowledge, “We are thrilled to have Wahl frame this year’s edition of SOFA New York with her provocative work that will doubtlessly energize veterans and newcomers alike,” added Mark Lyman, President, The Art Fair Company and Founder/Director of SOFA.
“I love the materiality of books,” explains Wahl, “and branches is a tribute of sorts to a medium in transition. It’s a wonderful opportunity to continue my exploration at SOFA in New York City—the center of the rapidly changing publishing industry. I want the fair’s audience to think about how they get their knowledge and to question their relationships to the natural world. What are the connections between nature and language? How does the existence of a multitude of new ways to communicate alter our understanding of meaning and significance?” The installation will continue a series that Wahl began in 2005, which addresses a set of ideas including accessibility and accumulation, synthesis and sustainability. Previous installations in the series have appeared at the Newport Art Museum and the Bristol Art Museum in Rhode Island and the Fuller Craft Museum of Art in Brockton, Massachusetts.
“Digital media has led such artists as Wendy Wahl to re-evaluate the potency of the printed word,” Akiko Busch wrote last fall in an essay in the catalog The 10th Wave III, “Wahl finds different ways to reconfigure the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica; the leaves may be stacked into forms that suggest an alternative forest of knowledge or tightly scrolled and packed within a frame, making for a composition that suggests a cabinet of hidden knowledge, those archives of information that are at once visible and concealed, at hand and remote.”
Wahl’s work is represented by browngrotta arts of Wilton, Connecticut. The gallery will feature other examples of Wahl’s work in its SOFA New York 2010 installation in booth 204. Wendy Wahl ‘s work can be found in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (New York, NY) and the American Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (through the Art in Embassies Program). She has exhibited throughout the world at venues such as the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, CA), the Newport Art Museum (Newport, RI), the University of Wollongong (Australia), and the International Textile Convention (Kyoto, Japan).
Technorati Tags:
SOFA NY, Art Installation, Wendy Wahl, Encyclopedia Britannica
We’re leaving the ice and snow (sigh) for sunnier climes next week, where 
with Valeria Belletti and Sam Goldwyn Jr.) The result is the highly idiosyncratic list below. I am indebted to artist Sabrina Gschwandtner and Fiberarts editor Marci Rae McDade who compiled a list of feature-length fiber-related films in the April/May 2009 issue of Fiberarts (their selections are asterisked below). I have added the parantheticals and other nominees in developing my own compilation. For a much more extensive list (132!) of films that feature just knitting, see Knitting in the Movies; there’s another at 
by Raoul D’harcourt (Univ of Washington Press, 1974; Dover Publications, 2002). I discovered this book in the Public Library in Chicago around 1958. It was a reference book and only in French. Later it was translated in English, and a few years later it was reprinted. Wonderful examples, history and diagrams; there’s nothing like it. It was like my bible. Not sure if it still available. There are many other books on Philosophy and Architecture that I would recommend, but the D’harcourt book was the most influential.
by Eric Broudy( Littlehampton Book Services Ltd., 1979; Published by the University Press of New England, 1993). This book is absolutely fascinating from a visual, historical, and technical point of view. The forms of looms have inspired me as sculptural elements in themselves. Understanding the evolution of their forms in a cultural context is invaluable. I have to imagine this book of interest to non-fiber people as well as serious fiber artists.
, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Hatje Cantz Publishers; Bilingual edition 2005). Agnes talked about waiting for inspiration… and waiting…and waiting…and waiting. She also spoke of not having unnecessary distractions in your life such as pets and unnecessary friends. I put my husband and the two cats up for adoption but so far no takers.
by Bernard Leach (Faber & Faber 1988).
(and all of its variations)(recent reprint, Weatherhill, 2008) had a HUGE influence on my work. The Japanese have a wonderful way of using indigenous materials to wrap things…packaging, transporting, presenting. Even now, years later, the influence of these old techniques prevails. This book and its information, not basketry nor bamboo, drove me to Japan in the first place. Who knew it would have such a profound influence on my work? If you look at some of the earlier work I exhibited through browngrotta arts, you’ll see Japanese packaging everywhere. In New York, the recent reprint can be found in Kinokuniya Bookstore on 6th Avenue. Love that place!
(University of California Press, 2004) is the absolute cornerstone of the project I have worked on for six years for the North Dakota Museum of Art. The book contains a series of papers and artist interviews that resulted from a year-long project all up and down the west coast (why not Portland???) in which Jacquelynn Bass and independent curator Mary Jane Jacobs looked at how curators shy away (to say the least) from work that has anything to do with spirituality. There were several retreats at a Zen Center in California, where papers on the topic were delivered. There’s more information about the project on the UC Press website. As to pursuing a career, I never really did that. I do what I do because I have to. It is what keeps me in the world.
by Frederick A. Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz (Phaidon Press, 2009) It’s an account of Albers’ teaching at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale. I took a summer course with him at Harvard when I lived in Cambridge and this book sums up some of the thing he had us do. It was very exciting.
by Germain Bazin, curator of the Louvre (Simon Schuster, NY, 1962) probably way out of print! The book is beautiful and I have it and love it still. 
(with Alexandra Quinn, Gibbs Smith, 2008). It is a wonderful book. He collects street trees and mills them and uses them in his work so he is dear to my heart. 
IF (Getty Publications; J. Paul Getty Museum; First Edition edition 1995) by another artist friend of mine, Sarah Perry. 
(The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2007) by John Elderfield, Elizabeth Reede, Richard Powell, Michael Auping, Martin Puryear. 
by Tony Birks (Marston House 1994). I feel this book documents her work very well. I am always amazed at the “drawing” she could do with glaze. 
(Wesleyan 1971). It was my weaving “Bible”. In fact everything she wrote makes so much sense to me. 
by Mildred Constantine/Jack Larsen (Van Nostrand Reinhold 1972) it just turned my ideas and work upside down. I saw what was possible with the materials I was using and what else was out there. That book opened up a whole new world to me. 
by Soetsu Yanagi (Kodansha International, Revised edition, 1990). One of my first trips after arriving in Tokyo three weeks ago was to the Mingeikan, Yanagi’s museum and home. It was a delight, after so many years, to see some of the work pictured in the book. Yanagi’s theory that hard, repetitive practice resulted eventually in the disengagement of self and led to work of merit produced with ease was an inspiration to me. I was a young grad student when I first read the book and at the time every day was a struggle. 
by Claude Levi-Strauss (University Of Chicago Press, 1968). The introduction made me think about the role of an artist and about materials.
Check Out: “On Thin Ice: Two Russians Skate Off the Reservation,” in the WSJ
Oksana-Domnina-and-Maxim-Shabalin
Contemporary textile artists’ work is often rich in references to other cultures. Traditional techniques are used to generate new forms; images and themes from other cultures are re-envisioned and contemporized. Through her study of Peruvian gauze weavings, Lenore Tawney discovered a reed that she was able to adapt to create the innovative slits and openings that characterized her work.
Shrouded River detail by Lenore Tawney
Carol Eckert’s coiled sculptures feature animal figures that are inspired by African ceremonial head dresses of the Yorubas; Kirsten Wagle and Astrid Løvaas
use old Norwegian tapestry techniques on unconventional materials from aluminum cladding to pantyhose;
Løvaas & Wagle create tapestries that are visually captivating, beautiful, surprising, and rich in references to art historical sources
Nancy Moore Bess’s baskets are informed by her travels to Japan, most recently re-interpretations of the jakago/snake baskets used in Asia to bind stones at the edge of a river or lake to prevent soil erosion; and Jin-Sook So reinvents Korean pojagi by creating patchworks of gold-plated steel mesh instead of the traditional scraps of ramie and hemp.
(Pojagi-inspired work) by Jin-Sook So
Is there a point at which cultural “borrowing” stops being an acceptable compliment and becomes unacceptable co-option? That’s the criticism being made of Russian figure-skaters Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, whose multicultural ice-dancing theme, based on aboriginal costumes, music and dance, have drawn the ire of Australian Aboriginal activists. On January 28, 2010 in the Wall Street Journal, Eric Felten reviewed the Olympic controversy, similar arguments made about white musicians having no right to play jazz, and recent cross-cultural creations by the likes of Paul Simon and Vampire Weekend.
In “On Thin Ice: Two Russians Skate off the Reservation,” Felten cites T.S. Eliot as endorsing artistic appropriation, quoting him as saying, “bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Felten argues that it is too much to expect “cultural interlopers” to make something better; it should be enough that the borrowing “makes for something different”. And sometimes that something different will be more than different. It will be art.