Spider Cannibalism

Samantha Bittman | Mary Heilmann | Katy Kirbach | Ellen Lesperance |
Stella Pettway and Marlene Bennett Jones of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers

June 21st — August 3rd, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, June 21st, from 5-8pm

RUSCHMAN
4148 N. Elston Ave.
Chicago, IL 60618

Let’s establish this now so we won’t have to manage damage control later: somewhere along the way, abstraction came to be positioned as the recourse of some alterity, a departure from what is recognizable at close range. Perhaps this is because many artists arrive at a period of working ‘abstractly’ after years and training in representation. But really it is the image that distances—at some remove from its referent, the image is caught up in exercises of control. Representation always already occupies some space other than what is depicted, and is useful to processes of naming, taxonomizing, and prescribing how something is seen and subsequently understood. Therein the ontological tangles into the epistemological, and significant uncertainty presses down into doubts about what can be said to exist before it is known, described, apprehended. Abstraction conversely offers processes by which relationships can be formed with the material and conceptual strata of our experiences on their own terms without much in the way of imposed cultural structures. Which is not to say that those relationships are free from interplays of power, or that there is any conceivable exterior to culture per se, but that abstraction works language backwards away from stabilization and fixity back into a poetics of sensation, perception, phenomenon.

Taken thus, it’s all too clear that lives are lived within abstraction: the irregular polygons that are seamed into garments, the arrays of patches and panels that wrap into blankets, the grids by which cities are organized, the grids by which systems are organized, the grids by which transcendental models for total endlessness are organized. Color not as symbol or nameable feeling nor national identity, but the flashing forms by which differences are measured. Light that is only incidentally holy because life depends on it, but also its vibrating energy, its sizzle.

The artists comprising Spider Cannibalism treat abstraction as a means of integration and also reckoning with one’s context—truly, stacks of shapes and patterns and materials and formal traits that amount to an all out inquiry into the veracity and flagging usefulness of that ‘one’ that has previously been made separate from what contains it. Ellen Lesperance emphasizes the embattled histories that conspire around these formalisms by researching how resistance, gender, and coalitions have directly opposed war, violence, and aggression, and all of the ways that embodiment, dress, craft, and art have been operative within those incitements. A productive etymological ambiguation haunts these works, where ‘pattern’ serves not only to describe the material accretions on tea-stained pages that aggregate references from Lesperance’s history-building, but ‘pattern’ also looks to these prior instances of direct action and protest as a template for emergent ethics with which to contend with the upset of our everyday.

Stella Pettway is one of the many notable women residing in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, who have for generations maintained a robust quilting workers co-op that has produced some of the most distinctive art objects from American culture across the last century. Most of the residents of the area are direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee; after abolition government loans made it possible for residents to acquire land that had been worked by their ancestors, an opportunity nonetheless troubled by a lack of many basic local provisions around transportation, wage labor, and access to the kinds of goods and resources enjoyed by a burgeoning middle class across the nation. Pettway’s quilts are indicative of the kinds of making do and reuse that define the resourcefulness of Gee’s Bend’s artists: salvaged parts of blue jeans and plaid flannel are imbricated into lively arrays of brightly dyed cottons.

Over two decades ago, Mary Heilmann—whose practice has always situated painting within a wider continuum of processes including pottery and furniture design—developed a chair with a simple design redolent of Donald Judd’s furniture (if not also the earlier Bauhaus) to encourage interaction, more prolonged looking, and a type of sociality around the comportments of viewing paintings. Heilmann’s chairs are equipped with wheels along with clashy, colorful woven seats and backs that appear as send-ups to the classic American lawn chair. The art object approaching its audience, inviting touch, sitting, inhabitation may just be the most refined conceit around abstraction’s rather than image culture’s primacy.

Katy Kirbach’s formal sensibilities are directed by a wisdom scaled to civilization, its rises, downfalls—her process pivots between deconstruction and reconstruction, enlisting fragmentation and catastrophe into an otherwise orderly system of gridded, woven strips of cotton or linen canvas. Embracing a kind of painting that is as preoccupied by its objecthood as its visuality, each of Kirbach’s works on view here are pluralistic, resulting from continuous reworking, undoing, redoing, and finding one within a multitude of possible permutations of their post-pixel arrangements. In Kirbach’s oeuvre, the means are as substantive and appreciated as their outcomes. This group of works in particular are derived from weaving diagrams developed by Anni Albers, a twentieth-century polymath associated with Bauhaus and later Black Mountain College.

Marlene Bennet Jones, another artist progenitor of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, justly belongs in the canon alongside such mavens of abstraction as Lee Krasner, Carmen Herrera, and Bridget Riley. Her fractured geometric fields are stitched as vibrant, lusty affairs that pop surprising color relationships into a schema simultaneously magnificent and modest. In parallel to some of the most formidable formal riddles with which painting has contended over the past century, Jones’ quilts likewise stage mounting tensions between emphases on the bounded, framing rectangle and a daring do of geometry approaching infinity.

In a coterie of contemporary practices that consider weaving as a kind of organizing principle, concept, and reference, Samantha Bittman hand weaves textiles that are subsequently stretched as canvases and overlaid with acrylic paintings that pose commentary and exchange with the patterns in the cloth. Echoes, simulations, instructional intonations, and a handling of image as a reflex that draws the traditions of weaving and painting into intimate dialogue populate Bittman’s sly and elegant works.

What more cunning counterargument to a flat earth conspiracy than the dimensional matrix of the weave? Against the supposed linearity of time and its accomplice, history, woven structures undulate through upset hierarchies, offering a divergent particle physics with which the archive may be explored. Practically a constant in the conventions of painting is the ways its underlying relationship to cloth and the labor of its making is taken for granted if not altogether subjugated within the logic of the medium—and with it, a load of problems around the gendering, remembering, forgetting, forcing, and undoing of an expanded field of artistic praxis as it has related to resistance, to women, and to a treatment of the material world that depends less on the powers to name and control. Staged here is an expansion on the kind of love between the mother spider and her progeny who she willingly allows to feed upon her corpus. Time travel, counter-narratives, meditative visions, rallying demands, and most of all an ethics of care are demonstrated through attenuated form. All of these practices share a starting place that presumes interconnectedness. Image depends on logics of verticality, while formalism is expressed relationally, across, in the horizontal. Divestment from unilateral trajectories gives way to webs.

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Tags: Ellen Lesperance, Gee's Bend Quiltmakers, Irving park, Katy Kirbach, Marlene Bennett Jones, Mary Heilmann, Ruschman, Samantha Bittman, Spider Cannibalism, Stella Pettway, Weaving