Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce “Above & Below,” an exhibition of work by 12 artists working with fabric, cloth, beads and woven materials. The exhibition opens to visitors June 15th and runs through August 28th, 2021.  

The exhibition title refers to the process of weaving—threading above and below lines of thread to create a fabric. Though the use of weaving and woven materials is what unites each of these artists, they employ a diverse range of artistic processes and practices from weaving, quilting, sewing, needlepoint and felting to assemblage and threading.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery has a long history of showing artists using woven practices. Most artists in the show previously have exhibited or continue to exhibit with the gallery: these artists are Gil Yefman, Dinh Q. Lê, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Elaine Reichek, Frances Trombly, Anina Major, Jeffrey Gibson, Terri Friedman, and James Richards. In addition, Madame Moreau, Max Colby, and Yveline Tropéa are all showing their work in our Los Angeles gallery for the first time.  

This is not a textile art exhibition. Much of the artwork has less to do with conventional ideas of weaving or an affinity for textile art as such and more to do with a sense of craftsmanship and process in art making. Major for instance works in clay, her process inspired by Bahamian basking weaving techniques. African beads and beading similarly underscore the work of both Moreau and Tropéa, while Gibson takes inspiration from Native American beading.  

It is curious to observe that much of what you might call the ‘assembly language’ of each of the works tends to follow a basic pattern, the design made of successive foldings above or below a line. This harkens back to early human craft practices and even resembles in some respects the systemic architecture of initial, low-level computer programming languages. Machines, it would seem, were first taught to learn and perform basic tasks in ways which mimicked creative human thoughts patterns.  

Making is the key here, with individual pieces carefully, sometimes painstakingly arranged, stitched, woven, handcrafted or embellished through loving labor. Several of the artworks were produced over a few months, sometimes in the studio or via social collaboration as in the case of Gil Yefman who worked with the Kuchinate, an African Women’s collective in Israel on the initial wet felting for his artworks, created originally for his exhibition “Kibbutz Buchenwald” at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.  

Form, scale and color are the considerations of utmost importance for all these artists, as much as materials and process in the works. Gschwandtner, Richards, Lê, Trombly, and even Friedman embrace abstraction to some extent: weaving or related techniques are used to obscure or to abstract raw, even sometimes graphic social and political visual source material ranging from posters and film stills to text, rope and printed bolts of fabric.  

Colby and Reichek are conceptual artists who consciously work in decorative art styles with prosaic, malleable materials. Their artwork is intended to evoke an immediate association with domesticity, gendered labor, or women’s work specifically, and is therefore political in its orientation, if not intention, as a statement of social and cultural identity and gender (and ongoing fluidity) in contemporary culture.  

The identity of the artist is a latent subject in a good deal of the artwork in this show, making many of the works autobiographical as in the case, most visibly, of Gibson, Lê, Colby, Major, Moreau, and Tropéa. To engage with their artwork is to enter their minds, to see a world anew through their eyes. Working above and below the line becomes a formal vehicle for a process of subjective storytelling, a way of ordering information to make sense of who they are, why and where they belong.