A little bit different from my grandmother's needlepoints of hummingbirds and native american...John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is delighted to announce their new exhibition, Brigid Berlin, Needlepoint. Featuring a selection of Berlin’s needlepoint work of the last ten years the show will open Oct. 21st with a reception for the artist between 6 pm and 8 pm, and run through Nov. 22nd.
It is not uncharacteristic that Berlin in later years has turned to the traditionally ladylike craft of needlepoint to create work that continues to challenge the social status quo, defy convention, and pose questions about taste and society. An avid consumer of tabloid newspapers, the “popular press” as it’s referred to in Britain, she translates front page headline broadsheets into genteel features of interior décor. Her subjects are typically crude, salacious paper-selling press announcements in origin designed to appall, shock, and titillate viewers. The meticulously executed needlepoint pieces transform the daily ghastliness of news occurrences and media spin into demure domestic objects of quaint design and questionable comfort. News products designed for a momentary frisson of engagement are rendered into soft edged but durable monuments that outlive the typical transitory lifespan expected of such unpalatable printed exclamations. Only, perhaps, by virtue of their fleeting existence – bought one day and consigned to the garbage the next - do we routinely tolerate the raging excesses of the contemporary newspaper industry. Plush and tactile as the finished works might be they defy any but the hardiest to cozy up to them. Sweetheart cushions they are not.
As carefully executed as they are the pieces invoke the traditional feminine practice of needlework when young girls were taught sewing skills and writing together, producing bland yet cheerful decorative samplers of prayers and pieties. Along with Annette Messager, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Saja, and Mark Newport, Berlin is not alone in her selection of a gendered craft like needlework to explore issues of cultural identity and engagement. Needlepoint, the province of women’s work for centuries, has traditionally been excluded from the canon of the fine arts, possibly by virtue of the fact of its gender specificity. In laying claim to this work as art Berlin holds fast to the principles of works produced in the sixties and later that refer directly to her gender – topless performance work, mono prints made using her breasts, and penis autograph books. Even still, these completed needlepoint “cushions” occupy an uneasy, undetermined space; is it art to be hung on the wall, or to be displayed on the couch? Is it a type of painting, or a form of soft sculpture? Alas such questions cannot all be so neatly sewn up into tightly stitched answers...
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It is not uncharacteristic that Berlin in later years has turned to the traditionally ladylike craft of needlepoint to create work that continues to challenge the social status quo, defy convention, and pose questions about taste and society. An avid consumer of tabloid newspapers, the “popular press” as it’s referred to in Britain, she translates front page headline broadsheets into genteel features of interior décor. Her subjects are typically crude, salacious paper-selling press announcements in origin designed to appall, shock, and titillate viewers. The meticulously executed needlepoint pieces transform the daily ghastliness of news occurrences and media spin into demure domestic objects of quaint design and questionable comfort. News products designed for a momentary frisson of engagement are rendered into soft edged but durable monuments that outlive the typical transitory lifespan expected of such unpalatable printed exclamations. Only, perhaps, by virtue of their fleeting existence – bought one day and consigned to the garbage the next - do we routinely tolerate the raging excesses of the contemporary newspaper industry. Plush and tactile as the finished works might be they defy any but the hardiest to cozy up to them. Sweetheart cushions they are not.
As carefully executed as they are the pieces invoke the traditional feminine practice of needlework when young girls were taught sewing skills and writing together, producing bland yet cheerful decorative samplers of prayers and pieties. Along with Annette Messager, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Saja, and Mark Newport, Berlin is not alone in her selection of a gendered craft like needlework to explore issues of cultural identity and engagement. Needlepoint, the province of women’s work for centuries, has traditionally been excluded from the canon of the fine arts, possibly by virtue of the fact of its gender specificity. In laying claim to this work as art Berlin holds fast to the principles of works produced in the sixties and later that refer directly to her gender – topless performance work, mono prints made using her breasts, and penis autograph books. Even still, these completed needlepoint “cushions” occupy an uneasy, undetermined space; is it art to be hung on the wall, or to be displayed on the couch? Is it a type of painting, or a form of soft sculpture? Alas such questions cannot all be so neatly sewn up into tightly stitched answers...
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