WeaveWorld
Curated by Jacques Louis Vidal
Colt Hausman, Dmitri Hertz, Natalie Ochoa, Rose Marcus, Libby/Rosen
June 29 - August 31, 2024
In the 1987 Clive Barker novel Weaveworld, “the Fugue” is a reality that supersedes our own. Its threads stretch all around our world, as well as penetrating through it, giving us regular humans access only rarely. In the story the main character finds an entrance woven into a carpet. The six artists I have included in my iteration of WeaveWorld are all practitioners whose visions I find both broadly inspiring, and deeply mysterious, and whose work envelopes my own in many ways. They all approach making their work with rigor, and an almost alien specificity that I can’t help but obsess over, and try desperately to glean clarity from. If you’ll allow it, I can close my eyes now, and I see their work: it actually creates pathways for my thinking, as well as obstructions- Stopping where I might not be able to stop, or plowing right through gates that my van just can’t handle plowing through. What I find most exciting or frustrating about another person’s work often calcifies in place, forming a pillar that ends up forever defining my landscape. I am not exaggerating, these artists create a new reality for me, a completely new place.
How wonderful that I get to materialize this, to compose these various lent objects, textures, and ways of seeing that I could never have imagined in this space. In Barker’s novel, every part of life is a ritual, every creative act is a seduction or repulsion. Everything is choreographed with a hidden order that often appears discordant at first. I thought in keeping with this (and given the barn where the exhibition sits) that a starting position from square-dancing would be best to place the work, suspended from the ceiling waiting to initiate the first weaves or a do-si-do. My idea is that floating like this off the walls, and placed just so, they will create an obscured vulnerable space for all visitors like the center of a sparse dancefloor.
With much gratitude to all of the artists involved.
- Jacques Louis Vidal
PDF Version ︎︎︎
How wonderful that I get to materialize this, to compose these various lent objects, textures, and ways of seeing that I could never have imagined in this space. In Barker’s novel, every part of life is a ritual, every creative act is a seduction or repulsion. Everything is choreographed with a hidden order that often appears discordant at first. I thought in keeping with this (and given the barn where the exhibition sits) that a starting position from square-dancing would be best to place the work, suspended from the ceiling waiting to initiate the first weaves or a do-si-do. My idea is that floating like this off the walls, and placed just so, they will create an obscured vulnerable space for all visitors like the center of a sparse dancefloor.
With much gratitude to all of the artists involved.
- Jacques Louis Vidal
PDF Version ︎︎︎