Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to present Loose Ends, a group exhibition celebrating women working in textiles. The collection, featuring artists Kirsten Hassenfeld, Victoria Manganiello, Laura Marsh, Erin McQuarrie, Carolina Ponte, Aiko Tezuka and Ulla-Stina Wikander, explores the universal applicability of fabric, bridging cultural tradition with contemporary finesse, and emphasizing the medium’s constant state of evolution. The exhibition will open on Wednesday, June 30th, from 1 PM – 6 PM, and remain on view through August 6th, 2021.

Textiles tell stories. Rooted in historical processes, they are imbued with ritual, culture, and tradition: interactive archives that can be touched, held, worn, shared, and passed down. There are unique narratives born within the counting of threads, as there is within every stitch, weave, layer, seam, mend, tear, and year of age. The art of weaving traced back to neolithic times; embroidery the 3rd century; knitting the 5th century and decorative needlepoint the 16th century. Fabric forms and structures grew in complexity with the development of new tools. From ancient times to present day, methods of textile production have evolved as we evolve, influencing decoration, clothing and functional design. Fabric, as such, has become intrinsically human. 

The featured works from each contributing artist celebrate our entangled relationship with fabric, exploring its material processes as mechanisms for engaging with storytelling and temporal narratives. Erin McQuarrie presents the process of weaving as a form of live art, and looms as activateable, interactive sculptures. Her woven works then are artifactual, residues or records of live action. Aiko Tezuka explores weaving and unravelling as a way to detangle and understand interwoven surfaces; making visible an object’s current state of being, and opening a window to its greater history. Victoria Manganiello investigates our relationship with fabric as one of record, tracking/tracing history and evidencing individual experience through cultural production. Kirsten Hassenfeld employs weaving as a form of repurposing and reclamation, utilizing recycled materials and re-imagining technical processes to achieve organic structure. Carolina Ponte creates organic forms (tubules, spouts and nodules) through repetition, referencing cultural designs, patterning and color to emphasize the temporality of cultural archives. Laura Marsh uses textiles to generate and amplify dialogues around socio-political and humanitarian issues, championing accessibility, inclusivity and material exchange. Ulla-Stina Wikander uses cross-stitching to transform forgotten household objects with new context, re-dressing artifacts from bygone eras with a colorful, contemporary twist.

Loose Ends celebrates textiles as infinite: decorative and functional, intentional and intuitive, structured and amorphous, masculine and feminine, ageless and ancient, present and vanishing. Within each loose thread lies the potential for a new connection.