“Close to You”

You suspect that curator Sarah Quinton knew what she was doing when she positioned Allyson Mitchell’s 10- foot-tall, fun-fur-covered female sculpture, Big Trubs, near the entrance of the gallery for her playful textile show, “Close to You.” It seems, after all, like an appropriate first encounter at an exhibition set on exploring the mingling of popular culture and fibre-based art making. Standing with breasts bared, her massive buttocks jutting unabashedly behind her, Big Trubs is at once a menacing female force and a kindly, fuzzy host. Her outstretched arms, welcoming, are also intimidating, due to their overinflated size. Like the show she compels viewers to see, Big Trubs is playful and accessible—but peel back the furry exterior, and you’ve got a solid skeleton.

Because, though packed solid with clever, often lighthearted work touching on everything from Top 40 music to superheroes and comic characters, “Close to You” is also an intelligent look at textiles within the larger sphere of contemporary art. Timed to coincide with “Neo-Craft, the International Conference on the Crafts and Modernity,” held in Halifax in November 2007, the exhibition features the work of five artists who use everything from recycled bedsheets to embroidery and wool as the media for their Pop-culture-infused messages.

The notion of gender and the ever-present high-versus-low culture debate are never far from the surface with the bulk of the work in “Close to You.” As with Big Trubs, both issues are at play in works like Allyson Mitchell’s Shebaca, a two-dimensional Sasquatch-meets-Playboy woman rendered in fun fur. Eyes closed, the hairy subject trails her own furry fingers enticingly over a shock of overgrown pubic hair, all on a background of purple, rec-room shag carpet. The image is at once attractive and repulsive: while the work’s texture compels us to touch it, the subject, her hairy nipples bared, gives us pause. As much as the original image, lifted from the pages of a soft-core magazine, might once have enticed us, this self-satisfying, unshaven woman turns the pornographic voyeurism on its head: we are, instead, dared to watch.

Japanese artist Ai Kijima is represented in the exhibition by a number of frenetic textile collages made from found fabrics. Using everything from preprinted bedsheets and curtains to clothing and sleeping bags as artistic fodder, Kijima’s works are triumphant Pop-cultural mashups: fantasylands created by first delicately extracting, then reorganizing, recognizable characters from found materials into new and sprawling scenes. In works like Burn it Up, a two-and-a-half-metre wall hanging, Thomas the Tank Engine and Led Zeppelin’s fallen angel share the same psychic space as Lamb Chop and a patchwork of large-eyed cats. The result is a veritable cacophony of low-culture noise held together with minute stitches, almost anxiety-inducing in its candy-coloured glee.

The 44 framed embroideries that make up Michèle Provost’s It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, by contrast, are almost eerily calming in their salon-style installation along the gallery’s back wall. Each piece displays a hand-stitched line from a Top 40 rock song (which plays along as audio accompaniment) laid down on patterned swaths of high-end, decorative fabric. The effect is at once humorous and jarring: seeing the Smashing Pumpkins’s lyric “Crucify the Insincere Tonight,” for example, spelled out on a pale pink and grey floral background makes it look like something that could be hung above an overstuffed sofa in a well-kept home. The lyric itself, however, is graphic and unforgiving; all teenaged angst and anger. Framed and hung close together on the gallery wall, each out-of-context song lyric is reduced to a stupid one-liner, a poetic notion or an incomprehensible sentiment, while also seeming to represent the cultural consciousness of a particular time in history. From Hendrix’s “Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky” (pink and orange thread on pink and purple brocade) to Beck’s “I’m a Loser Baby, So Why Don’t You Kill Me?” (green thread on red textured fabric), the competing lyrics and the tension inherent in each work’s foreground and background seem to create their own conversations.

Scott Kildall’s Handwork, a single-channel video projection, is conceptually clever, though a bit of a monotonous watch. The 21-minute piece captures the artist in a single shot as he learns to crochet. Only visible from the waist up, his hands out of frame, the artist looks down in dogged concentration, punctuating the silence with the odd bit of frustrated irregular breathing. Created as an homage to Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Kildall even sets his scene against a brick wall), wherein a subject allegedly receives oral sex from an unseen partner, Handwork cheekily asks us to wonder what Kildall is really doing with his hands.

Creating one’s own superhero costumes out of wool, as Mark Newport does, is a poignant undertaking. Among the most successful works in the show, his series of full-body knitted suits, from Batman, Daredevil and The Fantastic Four (the latter a long, stretched suit), to the invented Bobbleman and Sweaterman, hang from the gallery walls like soft, emasculated shells. Buttoning up the back, the intricate outfits evoke memories of childhood sleepers and grandma cardigans—snuggly opposites to the skin-tight, six-pack-revealing ensembles traditionally donned by comic-book crime fighters. Also included in the exhibition are a number of self-portraits of the artist: a gentle superhero, less man of steel than man of comfort, who wears his own costumes to read the newspaper by a swimming pool (On Watch) or surveying his surrounds astride a white horse (The Scout). The suits seem to serve as a testament to today’s anxiety-ridden world, where even superheroes need a little cozy downtime. ■

“Close to You: contemporary textiles, intimacy and popular culture,” curated by Sarah Quinton, was exhibited at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax from October 19 to November 25, 2007.

Meredith Dault is a freelance writer based in Halifax.