Transmissions
Art Gallery at Evergreen Cultural Centre
May 13-July 23, 2023
Jonathan Alfaro, Thank You James H, 2022, Woolen yarn, chicken wire, zip ties, mdo, arduino, ultrasonic sensors, acryilic, and vibrating motors, 74” x 48” x 48”. Rachel Topham PhotographyJonathan Alfaro, Less Than Two More Than One 1 & 2, 2018, decontructed linen, both ~ 60 x 34.5”. Rachel Topham PhotographyInstallation views of Transmissions, exhibition at Art Gallery Evergreen | Evergreen Cultural Centre, 2023. Photo: Rachel Topham PhotographyJonathan Alfaro
Katherine Boyer
Roxanne Charles
Emily Hermant
Damla Tamer
Valérie d. Walker
Curatorial Essay by Katherine Dennis, curator
From conversations between makers over the fermentation vat to the family stories held within specific colours and patterns, both the textile-making process and the physical objects themselves communicate. Knowledge is shared, passed down through individualized techniques and traded (or stolen) across continents and over generations. The nuances of each finished piece are as individual as the practice is universal. The artworks of Jonathan Alfaro, Katherine Boyer, Roxanne Charles, Emily Hermant, Damla Tamer and Valérie d. Walker draw on these complex histories and rich cultural and personal practices connected to textiles. The artists play with ideas and a wide variety of organic and manufactured materials—from animal fibres and plant material to wire, silicone and plastic—to reveal how textiles form and transform. Their techniques span weaving, dyeing, knotting and casting, among other processes. Their resulting artworks’ relation to the body, three-dimensional space and evolving technologies stitch together the varied artworks of Transmissions.
Technology: From ancient indigo dyeing and the ancestral knowledge within Coast Salish weaving to the labour-intensive hand-knotting of yarn and the mapping of wire patterns, a radical slowness in the artworks counters the speed embedded in our technologically connected world. Textiles themselves, however, are in fact inseparable from technology. Using simple materials to create complex structures, weaving has been called the “the original binary system,” as textiles and computer language employ similar systems to represent information.i Evident in the visual similarity of a circuit board to fabric patterns, modern-day electronics such as Arduino boards, telecommunication cables and computer memory boards owe much to the history of textiles. This history of technological evolution begins with the mechanisms of making—hand, loom—and the chemical processes of dyeing that are some of humankind’s earliest standardized technologies.
Harnessing the wisdom of the land, Roxanne Charles’s Where have all the rivers gone (2018) ripples across the surface of the gallery wall. Incorporating beads, shells and brass, the artist wove the teal and grey wool with these found human-made objects in honour of local places suffering ongoing colonial impacts to ecological well-being and food security, strongly felt in Indigenous communities like the Semiahmoo First Nation. As a cultural historian, Charles records time and transformation within her large-scale weavings to reconnect with the land and waterways in this region.
Charles’s Where have all the rivers gone explores how water holds memory and movement, which is also reflected in Valérie d. Walker’s site-specific installation. Indigo Reverberations (2020–21) celebrates the power within the tending of the indigo vat and the slow-dyeing of fabric. The durational, labour intensive process of caring for a fermentation vat of indigo creates the space and time for storytelling, where knowledge-sharing transpires. Combining magic, chemistry and centuries of practice, Walker—who is an Indigo Griot: an African storyteller who preserves oral traditions—hand-dyed the organic cotton panels that form this mutable artwork. The labyrinth of oceanic blues welcomes visitors to immerse in the flowing panels adorned with shibori-zomé (hand shaped resist) and katazomé (hand-cut stencil) printing patterns. The artist studied the matrilineal tradition of natural indigo dying while living in Japan and, as a member of the African diaspora, she also understands the dark history of slavery inseparable from the trade of indigo across all bodies of water, along with the resiliency of the people who carry this tradition forward today.
This ancient practice of fabric dyeing helped shape our modernized, digitally connected world. Emily Hermant explores the intersection between high-speed technology and the slow labour of textiles. The artist’s colourful large-scale silicone hangings, Core 1 (2021) and Dash (2022), present repeating quilt-block patterns created from an unexpected source. The artist has transformed reclaimed data and telecommunications cables collected from local salvage yards into suspended sculptures. Their titles hint further at the connection to computers and communication systems like Morse code. Glitching within the colourful blocks extends the link between digital technology and textiles, and the brightly coloured patterns cause an afterimage effect of visual vibration. Using repeating geometry, the rubber skin-like membranes merge the digital and physical while bringing in notions of safety and comfort that are associated with quilts.
Sculptural form: From the ceiling, where silicone hangs and great swaths of fabric flow from above, to the floor, where a fiery pepper garden grows, the exhibited artworks produce three- dimensional space throughout the gallery. These diverse sculptural forms challenge the traditional presentation of artworks on a flat wall. Even those works that hang from the wall push out into space, disrupting the viewing plane to create depth and dimension. Jonathan Alfaro’s weavings Less Than Two and More Than One 1 and 11 (both 2018), break down the conventional distinction between image and support typical of two-dimensional paintings and drawings. The weavings, made from deconstructed linen canvas, are at once surface and structure, much like Hermant’s suspended sculptures.
While Alfaro’s weavings play with how we look at paintings on a wall, Katherine Boyer’s Below Our Feet and On Our Body (2018) spans the often-overlooked gallery floor. Using synthetic fibres that come from petroleum, Below Our Feet and On Our Body spreads out like an oil spill. The hooked-rug sculpture, with crimson and rust coloured strata, connect the land and land-use to the human body. Boyer learned to sew from her settler mother and knit from her maternal grandmother, while her connection to rug-hooking comes from her Métis father’s family. These familial material traditions evolved into her labour-intensive art practice. From a Métis perspective, Boyer considers what it means for herself and her family to walk this land and the ways unsustainable resource extraction continues to shape the environment we all call home.
Body: Whether the warmth of a carpet underfoot, the comfort of a quilt that adorns our bed or the clothing we wear everyday, the body is inseparable from textiles. The tactility of textiles recalls the human form, evoking the hands that made it and the body that wears it. Textiles also conjure the pleasure of touch, as fabric rests next to skin from the earliest swaddle of a newborn to a burial shroud. There is a duality of vulnerability and strength within material, where individual strands gain durability of form through weaving or knotting. Yet fabrics still break down over time, emphasizing the ephemeral nature of life.
Over 70,000 hand-tied knots coat the twin forms of Alfaro’s Thank You James H (2022), which vibrate to life. The artist uses movement and materials to evoke a longing sensation in the viewer: we want to embrace this pair of strange yet comforting creatures. Arduino board circuitry—used to control robots—and coding animates the charming humanlike forms that seem to have grown from 1970s shag carpeting. Alfaro’s sculptural companions are inseparable from the artist’s own body—both his queer identity and his familial lineage of weaving. The work’s title cites Nevada, an influential trans fiction novel by Imogen Binnie, offering a raw reflection of trans experience. For Alfaro, the relationship captured within the simple phrase shared between the book’s two main characters —"Thank You James H”— encompasses tenderness, care and queered intergenerational knowledge. This citation meshes with the significance of colour, which references another important relationship. The specific, saturated red of the wool yarn is a dye colour inherited from the artist’s grandfather, who was a weaver in Mexico.
Tiny knotted peppers pick up the intensity of red in Alfaro’s sculpture and carry with them another history from across the globe. Damla Tamer uses oya, a Turkish needlework technique practiced in Anatolia, to knot thread into a pepper garden in Pepper Garden/Biber Bahçesi (2021–22). The hot pepper motif, borrowed from historical cultural iconography, suggests feminine anger carried and passed down through generations of women. Typically, the tiny needle lace peppers adorn the edges of scarves as a form of symbolic communication of the feelings and emotions of the wearer. Tamer instead creates a spiralling garden of detailed knotting, presented low to the ground as if ready to take root and spread in this new environment.
Knowledge: The muscle memory within textiles remembers the way its movement and migrations across time and space have shaped cultures and customs, and how family and cultural heritage instills tremendous joy and strength in the face of systemic oppression. Boyer’s Mend on Wednesday: Gathering 4,225 Chains (2018) reflects on the Métis scrip system of land division used in the prairies—one of the many ways the colonial government took forced control of Indigenous lands. Starting from a performance and now exhibited as an object, this spool of 4,225 fabric “tags” make up the actual square footage of a river lot. All are hand-sewn together in one long string to reconnect those spaces that were parcelled off.
While Boyer’s work focuses on the physical space of land division and reconnection, Tamer’s weaving highlights the weight of political documents and their impact on society. The large-scale weaving Surface Conditions 2 (2022), which Tamer made of clear monofilament thread, would be almost invisible if not for a fine coating of paper. Pulped copies of the 2011 Istanbul Convention—a human rights treaty of the Council of Europe opposing violence against women and domestic violence—and the 2021 Turkish presidential decree to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention adhere to the ghostly weaving. The delicate coating sits in tension with the power of the words in these political documents and their real-life impacts on women in Turkey.
As visitors enter and exit the exhibition, they are greeted by Lhq’apet Stl’anouk : : To Tie Medicine (2017-) by Charles. These prayer hoops were created, and continue to grow in number, to honour the children and Survivors of residential school and those struggling with mental health and addiction. Presented in the gallery’s front window box, the work declares the resiliency of Indigenous Peoples and their cultural knowledges, that, as First Peoples on these lands, continually shape our world. Textiles are but one of the many gifts that carry this wisdom, and this work was made with love, prayers and medicines for healing.
Within the spun fibres of yarn, the warp and weft of a weaving, the blocks of a quilt and the bond of indigo dye to fabric, textiles hold boundless knowledge, transmitted over generations. Every artwork in Transmissions is one strand in a story explored by each artist, rooted in a vast web. These personal connections and topics of creative research tie into the complex global movement of textiles, where colonization, industrialization, slavery and trade entwine with stories of resilience, community belonging and near- and long-distant connection and communication.
i Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 75.