Upcoming at The Project, Jessica Rankin:
Currently at Andrea Rosen, Michael Raedeker:
About 10 years ago, Ghada Amer:
Painterly or "base materialistic" use of embroidery, among other topics, was considered in an essay I wrote in the Ghada Amer era, for an exhibition at Cristinerose gallery called "Thread."
Ghada Amer also embroiders, but her alphabet consists of the ritualized sexual poses of male-oriented pornography--girl with legs spread, girl separating buttocks, girl tonguing other girl’s labia--in repeated quasidecorative patterns across the surface of a stretched canvas. Here, too, the thread departs from the implied continuity of the dotted line, jumping from one image to another in a meandering, random flow that recalls Pollock’s drips or Marcel Duchamp’s “standard stoppages.” Removing pornography from the dark confines of the sex-shop and spotlighting it in the gallery, then robbing it of its clarity and specificity with a kind of physical “static,” Amer’s work both reveals and obscures.
It was interesting to encounter two recent examples of this way of working within 24 hours of each other, through my email inbox and a gallery visit, respectively. Minus the porn, as far as I know.