Material Message: Photographs of Fabric

Group exhibition curated for the Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio

15 May - 26 June 2021

Featuring work by artists Patty Carroll, Elizabeth M. Claffey, John Mann, Leonard Suryajaya, Selina Román, Jacinda Russell, and Morgan Ford Willingham

The history of photography abounds with images of fabric, starting with some of the first photographs ever made by William Henry Fox Talbot of lace 170 years ago, and continuing to our present day. Fabrics contain complex and symbolic messages of culture, commerce, and identity in both the photograph and in our everyday lives. Textile patterns may refer to cultures and appropriation, colors conjure powerful encoded meanings, and the surfaces and properties of fabric--it's transparency, opacity, or ability to catch and modulate light--make fabric uniquely desirable for the camera's ways of seeing and recording. From domestic textiles such as curtains, tablecloths, towels, and sheets; to clothing including veils, uniforms, undergarments, secondhand items, and those commemorating life's milestones; to yards of cut, raw fabric, photographs of fabrics demand our attention, our tactile memories, and our translation.

Various materials may evoke perceptions of modalities such as the feminine and the masculine, and as such comment on sexuality and the body as both historical and media critique. Fabrics suggest a range of choice, agency, and anxieties on the part of the human subject, while also revealing economic complications or class, global cultures, and gendered, religious, or other social or normative influences.

In Material Message, seven contemporary photographic artists mobilize fabric’s aesthetic, formal and conceptual potentials. These artists use fabric in order to subvert preconceived notions of social roles and the self, and make use of photography's malleability to construct messages ranging from notions of the veil to reveries on memory. Materials sometimes take the place of the figure entirely or seek to conceal objects, ultimately negotiating the nature of human preoccupations with what is hidden and what is revealed.