“Exhibit to feature woven textile as art,” The St. Augustine Record
Woven textiles become art objects in Crisp-Ellert Art Museum’s newest exhibit, “Layout.” The exhibit will be displayed from Jan. 15 through Feb. 27 at 48 Sevilla St.
Los Angeles-based artist Krysten Cunningham’s body of work is conversant with the history of sculpture as well as that of feminist textile production, often balancing qualities such as masculine vs. feminine, hard vs. soft, and industrial vs. handmade in an attempt to upend the hierarchies implicit between the two.
From her series of “God’s Eyes,” hand-dyed and rough-hewn jute woven around industrial metal rods, to colossal industrial fabricated looms with corresponding weavings and to her more recent string drawings that investigate fourth dimensional space and the hypercube, Cunningham demonstrates how materials and techniques traditionally associated with the applied arts can be critically framed against formal sculptural elements to draw attention to their “marginalized and rebellious status as art objects.”