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"Soft Life"
This abridged exhibition is knit together both by the tenuous materials it employs—thread and fabric—and by the intricate bonds of relationships between loved ones. That theme is best explored in the work of Stan Shellabarger and Dutes Miller, whose four untitled cut-paper self-portraits riff on Kara Walker’s esteemed perverse silhouettes from the antebellum South. Yet the surprise the duo’s black-paper profiles elicit doesn’t come from cultural difference, as it does in Walker’s work, but from the unexpected sameness of the artists’ figures: The elaborate entwining of the men’s hair and beards illustrates their domestic relationship. Just as intimate is Miller and Shellabarger’s Woven Beards (1991), an artifact made up of two bristly human hair braids.
In contrast, Danny Mansmith’s frolicsome installation Thread in My Veins (2008) doesn’t add up to much. The yarn balls and clothespins dangling from the ceiling, sewing machine on the floor, and framed fabric collages and stitched samplers spread over the walls evoke a cluttered and disheveled sewing room—but one that’s unfortunately devoid of compelling metaphors or vernacular beauty.
The show is rounded out by Aviva Alter’s manipulated army-grade woolen blankets and Rebecca Ringquist’s crazy-quilt landscapes, abstractions and figure compositions. But Shellabarger and Miller’s Between the Sheets is the exemplary gesture in “Soft Life”: The artists’ antique bed—and a video projected onto it of the couple sewing themselves into the bedding—epitomizes the gauziness of emotional ties and thread alike.
