Radiant Fibers

August 27- October 11, 2024

Ancient Futures, Craftwork. Hand woven textile with fiber optics and electronics.

The Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery is pleased to present Radiant Fibers, an exhibition focusing on artists whose work interweaves traditional methodologies from fiber arts and craft with new and emerging technologies.This exhibit delves into the artistic interplay of eTextiles and light, exploring how visual narratives unfold through the fusion of circuitry and textiles. Drawing upon the realms of traditional craft and experimental technology, this exhibition showcases a breath of work including large scale installations to small-scale swatches. The artist showcased are alumni of electronic textile camp, an artist-run residency for creative practitioners working at the intersection of craft, computation, textiles, and electronics.The exhibition features large scale work by artists Nicole Yi Messier and Victoria Manganiello of Craftwork Collective, Layla Klinger and Linh My Truong.

Photo by Marie-Luise Skibbe

Craftwork Collective is a transdisciplinary studio founded by Nicole Yi Messier and Victoria Manganiello. Working on experiential sculptures, installations, and projects, Craftwork Collective explores the nature of craft through innovation, storytelling, and future building. With a broad-based skill set, they unite around emerging technologies and materials explored through historical and cultural contexts.

For this exhibition, Craftwork Collective presents Ancient Futures, an installation that features 18 suspended textile panels which engage with audiences by enabling them to record a voice message. This message consequently gets decoded via chat GPT to distill its emotional timbre. According to Messier and Manganiello, Ancient Futures draws inspiration from the ways in which textiles “have held humanity’s secrets across time and space.”Ancient Futures engages with the possibilities of A.I. as a tool of connection and translation, but also of the possibilities of confusion and discord- what ultimately can Chat GPt understand and encode of human emotion and how can we as audiences and participants of the work engage with and understand one another in deeper and more fundamental ways?

Linh My Truong is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working with textiles, video, and electronics. Through her exploration of the Japanese marbling art of suminagashi and her penchant for hard geometric forms, her work finds a place between chaos theory and an ordered universe. Her application of technology uses light to create immersive art installations, bringing traditional art forms into the 21st century. Included in this exhibition is Body Talk, a work that invites participants to delve into the intricacies of body language and communication through an immersive interactive installation. By isolating gestures and expressions from their physical context, the installation prompts contemplation: can we still decipher the intended messages when presented with fragmented snippets of observation?

This multi-layered projection-mapped experience transforms participants into active contributors, as they engage with felted controllers to trigger video clips. Through their interactions, participants create unique video collages, exploring novel combinations of body gestures and creating a dynamic tapestry of expression.

Layla Klinger is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working across sculpture, lacemaking, audiovisual installation, and queer performance. For this exhibition, Klinger présents KHIRUR, a lace instrument/sculpture activated through light. Lace, a collection of aesthetic holes, is a delicate textile for revealing and concealing one’s body. In KHIRUR, lace becomes a translucent web mirroring the dimensions of its maker’s body. Light, sound, and destabilized holes come together to seduce the viewer, slowly transforming into a visual soundscape where anxiety, desire, violence, and sexuality blend and merge.

In addition Radiant Fibers features a special collection of swatches produced by participants of swatches of the Electronic Textile camp. Traditionally associated with craft and textile work, a swatchbook is a collection of artist-made samples demonstrating process and experimentation through iterative fabrication techniques, materials, and aesthetics. The swatchbook is a knowledge sharing tool in the craft-field where work samples, findings, and processes can be documented, celebrating quality workmanship. Swatches and swatchbooks provide an insight into an artist’s process and can themselves possess a presence.

In conjunction with the opening of this exhibition, exhibiting artists Nicole Yi Messier, Victoria Manganiello and Linh My Truong will speak about their work, its context, and its development in Art 133 from 5 - 6 pm. This presentation and the following opening reception, held immediately afterward from 6 – 7:30 pm, are free and open to the public.