Textiles by Vandana Jain, Sarah Browne & Donna Huanca

curated by Sara Hines

Letters stitched in time address the present… The works in this exhibition politicize traditional methods of needlecraft as a means to examine and question prevailing cultural notions of mass morality and collective experience. The stitch sampler dates back to the middle ages whence it began as a necessary and practical tool before the advent of the recorded needlework pattern. The Victorian era ushered in a conservatization of culture along with the rise of the leisure class, and the sampler’s role transformed from purely practical to morally didactic. It became a way to keep the idle hands of young genteel ladies busy as well as a way to instill the glory of God through the practiced stitch of moral and religious aphorisms. This allusion to the “sampler” refers to a cooptation by these artists of the moral vernacular of traditional needlecraft. Likewise, their decidedly hand-crafted works comment on and contrast global corporatism and refer to a localized (and feminized) model of production and distribution. – S. Hines