Burnett Gallery Exhibit:  Material Moments
February 12 through March 6, 2005
 

"Material Moments" (fiber arts)

"Material Moments" suggests that there are points in time that expand as a viewer attunes to the materials of which artworks are made. This show brings out the delicate, translucent qualities that fiber has and contrasts them with weightier and more structured works.

Two of the artists, Joan Margolies-Kiernan and Victoria May, use silk organza, a cloth with almost no substance, to convey vulnerability, delicacy, and the softness of skin. Combining organza with other materials like ground steel or wood, each artist adds a positive charge to the fiber form.

Pilar Aguero stitches sheets of glassine together with thread to make her structures and paints them with beeswax. The coating of beeswax stiffens the thin paper and gives it strength to stand on its own. They glow with an onionskin translucency.

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood makes a wire grid, a heavy "veil," that sets up a fence-like barrier in front of her politized cloth. Christine Laffer weaves a heavy tapestry of blue cloth that hangs a thick architecture on the wall.

These works offer an expansive view of fibrous materials from intimate and fragile, to constructed and dense. Their moments take the touch of fiber, its light and its mark of time and set them within human experience.

The show will continue through March 6.