Margo Wolowiec: The Elusive Narrative, written for Surface Design Journal, May 2015
Margo's work is really stunning. Here is an analysis of her work for your reading pleasure and art edification.
Margo Wolowiec: The
Elusive Narrative
By Leora Lutz, published in Surface
Design Journal, May 2015
The inundation of images on the internet makes for a
primordial soup that requires a weeding out to stay afloat in the quagmire. The
choice to look or look away, constantly poses a conundrum between the pressure
to be informed and involved; while simultaneously attempting to maintain some
semblance of disconnect for the sake of one’s identity and peace of mind. At
the root of Margo Wolowiec’s weaving’s is a rigorous practice of gathering
images from the internet, then reappropriating and manipulating them to a tangible
end. Her work bridges the ever-lessening divide between technology and the
hand-made. The result is work that not only addresses formal qualities of
geometric abstraction, but also questions the phenomenology of memory, place
and the archive.
For the last four years, Wolowiec has predominantly been
using technology-based making processes in conjunction with weaving techniques.
Usually, she uses white warp threads, but this past year she has been adding
color with traditional dyes. These are then woven as plump and rounded “X”
shapes that mimic Photoshop brush tool lines. In an email conversation,
Wolowiec made a personal connection with painter Laura Owens’ representation of
Photoshop brush tool shapes. Although Wolowiec equates her work in dialog with
painting, she does not feel it necessary to defend her work in the art vs.
craft discussion. Dipping into post-minimalism’s use of fabrics and mixed media,
her work alludes to abstract painting while at the same time denying the
material of paint. Using a symbolic reference to a brush tool adds a layer of
technology that works in conjunction with the hand, pushing the implications of
the maker’s control.
It is the conceptual lack of control that activates
her work beyond the tangible tools and obvious references. While working on new
techniques in 2012, Wolowiec recalled her grandparents pining over her
childhood city of Detroit. Their memories overwhelmed her with a sense of loss
and lament. For her MFA thesis exhibition Hin Und Weider at California
College of the Arts in 2013, she wrote “In my practice, this lament has
become a fertile ground for analyzing and revealing changing landscapes of
immateriality, opening up new understandings of language, the body, and
personal histories.”
With these thoughts in mind, she began the first works that involved printing
images of Detroit maps on the weft, which she left unwoven to further reiterate
the incompleteness of the city in its current state.
The unweaving continued while her archiving process
for gathering images expanded in works that were shown in January of 2014 at
Johansson Projects, Oakland. Wolowiec uses an app on her smartphone that
automatically downloads images for her and places them in a Dropbox folder. As
she goes about her day engaging in the real world, “liking” things and taking
pictures on Instagram, the app is responding and auto-archiving more images out
of the worldwide Web based
upon her interests or preferences. Later, Wolowiec goes through the images
provided for her and begins to form new relationships with them. For instance,
she has been making an album of “dream homes”—images of houses where she wishes
she could live. But where does the space between reality and fiction collide? She
is allowing feelings of anxiety and desire to fold into the selection process,
to generate meaning and to create narratives that she
prints onto the weft threads using a sublimation process.
The first stage of the process involves printing
mirror images on heat sensitive paper. The second step is extremely laborious, requiring
that the weft string be laid out on top of one printed image, close together in
a single layer. The mirror printed image is then laid on top of the string and
the three layers are pressed together in a large heat press to set the dyes
onto the string. Because the strands are loose and not yet bound, there is a
high chance for irregularity—specifically, the sides of the string that are not
imprinted with ink leave a tiny white band. Once the strings are woven onto the
warps, these small untouched spaces next to bright colors lend an overall static
effect when viewed from a distance. For Wolowiec, process quirks are fully
embraced as inherent of the string’s materiality, and conceptually play into
the work’s premise to upend what is known or remembered and therefore archived.
In April 2014, Wolowiec mounted a solo exhibition of
new work at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles, drawing from current everyday
online source imagery and Navajo traditions. The show remarked
upon notions of place and how one locates themselves in greater conversations,
akin to the Navajo’s use of abstract symbology and methodology.Embedded
in Navajo visual nomenclature are keys to understanding each weaver and their interpretation
of culture. Each author inserts their own narrative into each piece, signifying
an unspoken understanding conveyed by a visual language known in the community.
Deborah Brinkerhoff (curator of The Navajo Weaving Tradition at The Bruce Museum in 2000) remarked
that the weaver’s intentions and personal meanings are embedded in the work. “The
individual’s freedom to make decisions about design, color and technique has
remained at the center of Navajo weaving.” Viewers
may interpret the work for their own edification; the artist’s true intentions will
never be entirely known or revealed. “The meaning belongs to the textile,”
Brinkerhoff explains. Like the Navajo, Wolowiec’s weavings are elusive and open
for analysis. Her appropriation of Internet imagery provides clues to her
trains of thought, but the rest is left hidden in the textile.
Bold and vividly arresting patterns dominated the
scene at Anat Ebgi Gallery. Throughout the selection, large diamonds or wide
bands hover over fields of smaller abstract patterns. The titles lead the
viewer into a curious dialog with the work.
Due
North and
A Specific Direction
point toward an unknown locale, although inferences can be assumed based upon
color and hints of representation. In the former, blues, blacks and whites are
predominant, while indecipherable figures bleed through water or snow. The
second is more ambiguous: a chevron pattern, used on road signage to delineate
lanes or caution directional cues of a curving road.
Crumpled in the Back Seat features layered diamonds in golden,
canary and butter yellows. The morbid connotation of the title seems to imply a
car accident, while the yellow diamond shapes appear to emulate warning or
caution road signs. The blur of the layered diamonds mimics the whirr of a
speeding car. Meanwhile, Three Degrees
and No Visibility refers to aeronautic stipulations and extreme wind
direction variance classifications for flying. Together, the titles and the
material converge in Postdigital storytelling.
Postdigital artists are concerned with creating
semblance between technology and humanist needs such as haptic gesture,
physicality, dimensionality—anything that relocates the body away from the
screen and activates it in the tangible living world.
As the Postdigital artist and theorist Maurice Benayoun points out, “I rely on technology as long as it
helps me improve and make clear my relationships with other people, or better
comprehend and deal with the world. Only then, I consider technology as my tool
of choice.” For
Wolowiec, technology and gathering an archive serve as the intangible portion
of material, while string and weaving are the literal materials. Both are tools
dependent upon each other as the concepts and subjects of her work. But it is
up to artists like Wolowiec to take technology and use it for other ends, to
bring it forth as concept, subject and material. Wolowiec, like other artists today,
is working in an era that has no distinct movements, except for that of the
digital—a pervasive entity that encroaches upon everything in life, not just
the arts. “Today it is necessary to include the
information world within the “tissues” of the real,” Benayoun continues.
Although Wolowiec does not self-identify as a Postdigital artist, there is a parallel
with her process and a humanist focus.
“We are
slipping further and further in to a digital realm,” Wolowiec stated recently, “and
this is somehow truncating our daily methods of communication.”Her
work eludes direct narrative, concentrating instead on the intangible qualities
of communication—those moments when reality becomes a figment, where memory
serves to fragment, and the archive— albeit tangible “proof”— is only a portion
of the truth. All of which is very real and somehow peaceful, despite its
elusive nature.
