There’s no particular reason that fiber artists should be tricksters. Nevertheless, the textile innovators who work in Hudson County are always getting one over on us. That’s true for Woolpunk, the provocateur who spun a huge American flag across the steps to nowhere inside the Central Railroad Terminal, and Sarah Grace, the Deep Space regular who makes plush mats in the shape of ordinary objects from tufted yarn, and HAMEWS, who, at SMUSH Gallery, planted cloth replicas of all the houseplants that had died on her watch. Fiber pieces are never what they seem to be at first. Like those vegan kitchen magicians who turn vegetables into fantastic approximations of meat, textile artists specialize in the switcheroo. That misdirection — a little sleight of hand by the maker for the amusement of the viewer — feels like it’s part of the art. It’s definitely part of the show.
Lisa Lackey, for instance, once called an exhibition “It’s Not Paint!,” and her inclusion on exclamation point in the handle had a bit of voila to it. Lackey is painterly indeed — her cityscapes, street scenes and domestic settings are captured and framed as a landscape artist might, and sometimes hint at Hopperesque narratives. Framed pieces which she calls textile paintings are full of fields of urban color: brick red, sidewalk beige, hazard orange and the weathered blue of school lunchroom benches. Yet none of it is pigment applied to canvas. Instead, Lackey sews together pieces and swatches of fabric deftly and presents finished pictures of great intricacy and density of visual happenstance. The nimbleness of Lackey’s stitching creates the illusion. Closer inspection reveals Lackey to be a textile artist of considerable ingenuity and the possessor a mischievous spirit.
“Walking in My Shoes,” Lackey’s solo show at Arturo Gallery (43 Dey St., opening Friday night at 6 p.m.), brings to Jersey City some of her best pieces, including three that demonstrate her virtuosity and her riddle-solving skills. Since the artist works from photographs — a hard thing to miss, given what she depicts — she must figure out ways to make her textiles mimic optical effects generated by the sun and other sources of illumination. The most spectacular of these pieces is also one of Lackey’s most superficially modest: “It’s Complicated,” a relatively small study of light as it penetrates the metal latticework of lawn furniture and throws crosshatches and tiny diamonds on a concrete patio. The fiber artist gets the angles just right, stretching a netting of black fabric at the exact angle to capture the effect she’s trying to achieve and letting the stitching do the rest of the work. This is visually mesmerizing. It also feels like the solution to an engineering puzzle.
Lisa Lackey loves shadows not merely because of her skill at summoning them from fabric and thread. She’s interested in the information they bring to her pieces. From Lackey’s shadows, we can tell what time of day it is, what the weather is like, and sometimes even when in the year her one-panel stories are set. Light through the slats of a boardwalk bench in “Wish You Were Here” tells the tale of a summer slipping away as we’re lured deeper into a long afternoon. The slanting shadows in textile paintings like “Afternoon Walk” do more than merely establish the setting: they also orient the viewer somewhere behind an implied camera, looking over Lackey’s shoulder. The artist is a constant ghostly presence in her own work, daring the viewer to pin her down even as she is visible only in silhouette.
This all comes to a dizzying head in “Reflections,” an intellectually provocative work of fiber art that approaches photorealism in its granular detail. The artist captures her own spectral image in the plate glass window of a diner, and gives us a peek inside the restaurant (including the menu behind the counter) and a mirrored view of the street behind her. Are we on the outside of the space looking in, or are we behind Lackey, observing her? If so, where is our own reflection? Though the artist gives us more personal detail than she usually affords us in her shadowy self portraits, she’s still not tipping her hand: we see her glasses, but not the eyes behind them. Instead, she’s stitched a cross over her face that makes her look a little like an impassive stuffed animal and a little like a sewing pattern. She’ll come into being when the rest of her world does: when she puts needle to fabric and sews in the specifics.
Lately, she’s exercised a lighter touch while pulling our strings. Recent Lackey textile paintings maintain the drama of her best-known pieces — check out her depiction of a cracked bridge choked with pol tape — but aren’t as shadow-drenched as her earlier work. Instead, she’s been letting her fabric breathe, and telling her stories in direct visual gestures. The attractive “Color Block” feels like it exists in dialogue with the work of the New Jersey minimalist painter Gwen Yip, an artist who generates an unmistakable sense of city existence with flat, gradient-free color fields and wide expanses that stretch unimpeded toward a grey horizon. In the piece, Lackey’s vision is much livelier than that, but she’s still picking her details judiciously, opting for broad strokes, and mixing the photorealism of signs, sidewalks, and suburban flats with Seussian bushes that resemble great green pillows.
If Lackey makes fiber art with the documentary quality of photographs, Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart and Vitaly Zamler transmute photography into fiber art. “What Weaves Us Together,” an audacious, frequently glorious show at MoRA (80 Grand St., on view until Dec. 11), could have focused on showcasing the artists’ wild techniques, which involve printing altered photographs onto rugs, screens and rubber diving suits. Instead — and to their credit — the two experimentalists are letting their pieces speak for themselves. And speak they do, in firm, clear, well-modulated voices, about the mutability of textiles and the glory of bold color and striking shapes. Not everything in the show was made by Zamler and Zamler-Carhart, but the majority of it was, and many of the other contributors to “What Weaves Us Together” have a clear relationship to the two principals. This is their own plush, strangely optimistic perspective, and “What Weaves Us Together” is as ambitious, coherent, and invigorating as anything presented in Jersey City in 2024.
Take “Kolobok,” for instance, an exercise in oven-warm reds and oranges that practically leaps from the far wall of the main gallery. This seven-foot square tapestry sets circles behind circles and also seems to contain faces peeking from the curves, and hunched shoulders, and enough legs to kick the design forward and get it rolling. Everything about the design suggests transience, but the deep-dyed hues scream permanence. There’s no way to know from looking at it, but the very heart of this image is a plastic bag that the artists captured on camera in a parking lot. They’ve doubled and tripled the photograph, mirrored it, and, through the power of steam and the conductive quality of nylon fiber, transferred it to textile. They’re up to something similar on “Peach Martini,” a tall-poured mini-tapestry the color of a tequila sunrise, and one that bears a steam-dyed design that hints at the cool mysteries of industrial architecture.
That interest in idiosyncratic design and the built environment is acutely felt on “Ann Arbor,” a vision of the city warped, condensed, packed like a snowball, and suspended in space. The artists’ amalgamation of brick walls, windows, quivering smokestacks, outdoor stairways, and apartment floors with their tops lopped off is a New Urbanist’s fever dream of perfect density. Yet as crunched as these brick walls are, the effect of the piece is one of weightlessness. Zamler and Zamler-Carhart have printed the image of their sky harbor on a moiré lattice made of cotton. As the viewer walks by the picture of this odd compound structure, everything seems to ripple and undulate as if the buildings were as soft as a loosely-woven towel. The shadow of the image on the wall behind the piece is a terra cotta-tinted blur in the shape of the printed image: a dream-realization of a city of light.
This gleeful dance between the printed object and the matter imprinted — one that enhances the qualities of the image and the surface alike — is repeated all over “What Weaves Us Together.” “Medusa Bunny,” a compound photograph of a stuffed animal attached, in Lovecraftian fashion, to a tangle of vacuum hoses, is superimposed on sleek, buckling neoprene. Pictures of miso soup (yes, really!) are collated and colored and then captured on a diaphanous drape of silk. The artists suspend this thin fabric from a thin teak rod and backlight it so that the filaments in the image shine like gilding. This is gorgeousness coaxed from the mundane, and a good and productive application of mad science.
The other contributors to the show aren’t quite as off the wall as Zamler and Zamler-Carhart, but they author their own departures from expectation. The Rwandan artist Moise Izabiriza cuts up thousands of measuring tapes and sews them together into a big, shaggy hanging made from the accretion of fabric and numerals. In its combination of looseness and obsessiveness, it resembles the bottle-cap tapestries of the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, who isn’t exactly a fiber artist, but who gets metal to behave like textiles. Tunde Odunlade, a Nigerian textile artist and Zamler and Zamler-Carhart’s teacher, finds room for pictograms, icons of native Southwestern deities, and stitched outlines of computer equipment on a massive ten-foot sheet. Then there’s Hyemin Lee’s spiral comprised of hundreds of colored wallet-sized pillows, rising from a coil on the floor to a twisting column taller than a man. Each of these pieces is very different, but they all share an impish spirit common to fiber art. Unlike other disciplines, there isn’t a mile-long museum tradition tethered to textiles. This segment of the visual art world is still the realm of pranksters: a Wild West of fabric where anything goes. We should enjoy it while we can. Lisa Lackey, Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart, and Vitaly Zamler certainly are.