Valérie Chaussonnet’s Lovers #3 (photos courtesy of Bolm Arts)
Despite its origins as a hands-on, community-building art form, fast fashion and industrialization have transformed textile production into an increasingly distant practice. With “Brave New Textiles,” artist-run nonprofit Bolm Arts highlights a cohort of Central Texas creatives who reclaim the medium as a means to examine topics of identity, physicality, politics, and the natural and industrial worlds. As curator Amanda Fay noted when we chatted shortly after the exhibit’s April 17 opening, in such a tangible medium, often a textile piece’s meaning lies within the materials themselves.
Valérie Chaussonnet’s works, for example, use raw fibers and traditional threadwork to create site-specific, personal embroideries of local flora. Lovers #3 consists of a Barton Hills leaf embroidered with winding golden thread, stitching a rippling border and securing a smaller, shapely leaf over a larger, reddish one. The leaves’ stems and thread lay intertwined atop framed white paper.
Steef Crombach’s ERCOT Whiteout
Texture too comes into play in this Eastside gallery show. Steef Crombach’s almost alien form ERCOT Whiteout chills as it flawlessly replicates the surface of piled snow, or perhaps overgrown mold. With its off-white, flock fiber-coated surface, the expanding foam piece stirs memories of the 2021 Winter Storm Uri after which it is named.
Jonas Criscoe carefully curates materials including a Converse sneaker, a guest check, and an image of La Virgen de Guadalupe to create Return to Amarillo, a mixed-media patchwork tapestry that combines with acrylic paint and fabric scraps on a salvaged piece of wood. Continuing this trend of resourcing found fabrics, Corinne Loperfido’s stitched banners upcycle used textiles with screenprinted and sewn text patches. She incorporates sociopolitical messaging into ransom note-like phrases, from shorter statements akin to Jenny Holzer’s truisms like “AS A WOMAN I’M ALIVE BUT NOT FREE” to strings of charged slogans that build on each other.
Artist-run nonprofit Bolm Arts highlights a cohort of Central Texas creatives who reclaim fiber art as a means to examine topics of identity, physicality, politics, and the natural and industrial worlds.
Ironically, next to Loperfido’s anticonsumerist emblems are Autumn Mae’s Peek-a-boo and Not a Murakami, two Louis Vuitton bag lookalikes. Made of PVC fabric and printed plastisol ink, these works raise questions of authenticity and the material value of textile goods as Mae mimics luxury-brand bags and manipulates their forms into something entirely new, yet easily recognizable.
Amanda Fay’s Labor Study II
Amanda Fay’s Labor Study I and Labor Study II more directly explore textiles in commercial contexts. Returning to the themes of naturalism present throughout the show, she embroiders phrases like “GET OUT AND TOUCH GRASS / DON’T FORGET TO UNPLUG” into salvaged denim scraps. This work, coupled with Loperfido’s neighboring “NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR” piece and “SPEND LESS WORK LESS” patches, emphasizes the reclamation of textiles from mass production and consumerism. Along with Chaussonnet and Criscoe’s found materials, these artists highlight the material, physical meaning of the fibers they work with.
The breadth of work in “Brave New Textiles” reveals the duality of fiber as both a manufactured material and a personal craft. Curators Fay and Stephanie Mervine noted the natural emergence of the show’s themes: Despite the wide range of textile artists and their varied approaches to fibers, the majority of submissions all touched on the interplay of textiles and identity. Collaging and curating works from raw and found materials, these artists meet at the intersection of utility and artistry.
“Brave New Textiles”
Bolm Arts
Through May 3 (by appointment only)
