Unraveling the Painter’s Weave
By Eva Heisler
Hildur Bjarnad�ttir, Frippery 2004. Velvet pile embodery on a table cloth 60 x 60 inches on a pedastal
Hildur Bjarnad�ttir unraveled two yards of painter’s canvas, which she rewove as a wall hanging. The result–Reconstructed Canvas IIconsists of crocheted squares surrounding an expanse of unmarked linen: the promise of blank canvas is rewoven into the blankness of ornamentation. The work is not decorative, if "decorative" is understood as pleasing and passive; rather, the work presents an image of the decorative as an effect of unraveling the ground of painting.
Bjarnad�ttir, a young Icelandic artist who studied at Pratt, is preoccupied with testing the conceptual and material parameters of something called "textile art," a problematic term with its implication that the stitch is of considerably less value than the mark. The overarching title of Bjarnad�ttir’s solo exhibition at AS� Art Museum, Reykjavik, "Work(s)", alludes to that term’s multiple meanings, in particular the understanding of "work" as labor versus the use of the term to refer to a product (as in "work of art"). In contrast to the labor-intensive Reconstructed Canvas, Bjarnad�ttir’s Golden Mean is a slab of readymade Formica mounted on the wall; this particular design, found at Home Depot, reproduces the look of linen and is called "Painter’s Weave." In both these works, the blank canvas is offered as an image; the canvas, as support, is impotent. In Frippery, the artist used the velvet pile technique–a technique for rendering embroidery plush and dimensional–to "ruin" an embroidered tablecloth with puffy representations of moss, making it impossible to use any surface over which the tablecloth is draped.
The highlight of the exhibition was a series of small 6 x 9 inch portraits. Each portrait is the result of applying a lint roller to a person–to hair and hands as well as to clothes. The lint squares, mounted on Plexiglas, are delicate, fuzzy blocks of color, threaded here and there with strands of hair. Lint Roller Portraits are the result of "shearing" an individual’s surface. Indeed, all of the works in this exhibition are preoccupied with the fraying of surfaces.
Hildur Bjarnad�ttir, "Work(s)," AS� Art Museum, Reykjavik, Aug. 21 — Sept. 12, 2004
