THE CLOCKWORK

It’s the middle of winter, the worst one in years. It’s also the middle of a pandemic, or maybe not the middle but only the beginning, or maybe it’s close to the end. No one knows. In a quiet studio, surrounded by stacks of folded cloth, an artist is working with a pair of scissors and a sewing machine, cutting up and stitching together countless fragments of fabric. Their sources are even more diverse than their irregular shapes: curtains, bedsheets, dish towels, women’s suits, embroidered tablecloths, brocade upholstery, scarves, men’s lon sleeve shirts, knitted blankets. Frequently interspersed in this panoply of thrift-store finds are cut-up pieces of her own gestural paintings, which themselves are invariably made on recycled domestic fabrics. Although most of the fabrics the artist utilizes derive from the shopping-mall America of her childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, her greater inspiration are the mobile cloth-and-wood shelters of the nomadic peoples of Central Asia. Feeling overwhelmed by the violence and intolerance that has been deluging her country for years, and anguished at the invisible threat of a deadly disease all around her, she no longer feels it is sufficient to make paintings to hang on walls where they can be looked at from a polite distance. She wants to be able to offer something different, a more immersive rapport between the body of the artwork and the body of the viewer. What she envisions as she patiently, meticulously cuts and stitches and sews is the painting as a room, an envelope, a blanket, a shell, a cave, an embrace, a home, a refuge, if only for a moment or an hour. Once her many hundreds of pieces will be assembled into a single enormous cloth, with miles of stitching and a kaleidoscope of colors, patterns and textures, something will be generated, she hopes, for whoever enters the enveloping mosaic of her painting-tent, something, she hopes, like love.

~ Raphael Rubinstein, from The Miraculous New York