Lucia Cuba’s “Ejercicios en salad” was inspired by people with cancer (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
BRIC Arts | Media House
647 Fulton St.
Through October 23, free
718-683-5600
www.bricartsmedia.org
Fort Greene-based BRIC Arts has teamed up with Tatter for a creative look at fabric and textile in art in the beautifully understated exhibition “Material Cultures.” The show follows Tatter’s mission “to promote the consciousness of cloth by considering, and celebrating, cloth’s intrinsic and essential relationship in human life.” The exhibit consists of colorful, imaginative works by eight mostly Brooklyn-based artists who use materials in inventive, sustainable ways. “Long before words, perception reflects the tactile,” cocurator and Tatter founder Jordana Munk Martin writes in her catalog essay, “Materiality, and the Primacy of Touch,” continuing, “Through intense materiality, [the artists collected here] ignite our own deeply personal associations with material. We view, but in viewing, we feel.” Mexican native Laura Anderson Barbata’s “Intervention: Indigo” features eleven ritualistic costumes (Manotas, Diablo I, Indigo Angel, Rogue Cop, others) bathed in indigo, a colored dye that has social significance for its use in the slave trade, on British military uniforms, and early American flags; a video shows the costumes being used in a parade. Lima-born fashion designer and social researcher Lucia Cuba sees clothing as cultural signifiers that define who we are in “Ejercicios en salad” (“Exercises on Health: Conversation I – Exercise II”), a trio of seated people dealing with cancer, covered from head to ankle in cotton rope, embroidery, and tapestry weaving, their individual identities as human beings stripped away from them. Sophia Narrett’s embroidered wall hangings look cute and adorable until you get up close and witness their “stories of embodiment, beauty, eroticism, personality, fear, and resignation,” where bad things are happening to women, based on photographs the Concord-born artist found on social media and reality television.
Laura Anderson Barbata’s “Intervention: Indigo” references ritual and the slave trade (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
El Paso’s Adrian Esparza searches for home in “Luna Park,” a deconstructed Mexican sarape whose colored threads, are nailed to the wall in circles and other ovular shapes that reference a 1916 Luna Park postcard. Toronto-born Elana Herzog’s untitled piece from her “Civilization and Its Discontents” series has been seemingly partially ripped from the wall, with tears, rips, and remnants of a Persian rug; across the gallery, her “Felled” is composed of logs and thick branches lying on a disintegrating rug. (You can watch her talk about her process here.) The show, curated by Martin with BRIC’s Elizabeth Ferrer and Jenny Gerow, is very much about process — stapling, gluing, ripping, weaving, knitting, dyeing, crocheting — and process is at the heart of Mexico City native Marela Zacarias’s awe-inducing “Mitochondrial Eve,” a labor-intensive construction, named for the ancient woman who just might be the mother of humankind, made of wood, window screens, joint compound, polymer, and acrylic paint. She folds window mesh as if she is dancing freely, then layers and sands the emerging shape, which in this case she paints in stark white that jumps off a black background. “Material Cultures” is a splendid collection of fabric-based art, one of the most compelling and involving exhibitions in the city right now. There will be free gallery tours of the show, which also includes work by Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia and Xenobia Bailey, on Wednesday at 10:30 and 11:30 am.