By Samuel Schwindt
Florals dance with armor; aggressive suturing marries fossilized detritus; foreboding becomes forewarning.
The idealized fractured is the idealized subverted — according to Ivory Gate Gallery’s group exhibition Connective Thread (curated by Michelle Alexander). Slipping down concrete steps in the affluent Chicago Gold Coast neighborhood, there’s a lurking, foreboding glamor in the works of Michelle Grabner, Sam Jaffe, Lauren Seiden, Michelle Alexander, Adrianne Rubenstein, and Carmen Neely.
The exhibition statement enshrines the showing as “both the intimate and universal aspects of womanhood.” The nestled below street-level gallery harbors quasi-textiles, papers, and other ephemeral-made-permanent gestures. The works propose a retribution: a re-framing without the frame. The frame, being the body, is absent; and the absences in the show can, and will, inform a liberation.
On the left, a scrunched construction is vaguely body-adjacent, an unstable figure. The steel-y outside hides an interior of blackened, shiny, and cratered skin. Lauren Seiden’s Ultimate Shield (no. 6) is an in-flux armor. The skin is the frame, is the architecture, is the body – a futuristic blending of form, envisioning where the melting of material personas and roles resolutely solidifies into self-defense, allegorically connecting to extraneous forces contorting bodies in space.
In the middle, Sam Jaffe’s I’ll Pick You is an algae outgrowth, a fossilized specimen of flowers in delicate pastels. It evokes a species of sneaky flora; perhaps one that has evasive or self-protective maneuvers. In a manner similar to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, I don’t want to state this is beautiful. When writing investigations (autobiographical, scientific, poetic) about the color blue, Nelson writes beautifying color choices are, in fact, “murderous to beauty.” Her investigation carries on with the societal cliché’s of women feeling “blue” and the pathologizing that follows. The colors Jaffe’s weaponizes remind me of this line: “If a color could deliver hope, does it follow it could also bring despair?” [1]
In the back, Michelle Alexander’s runaway bride is caught by a typical fashion display rack. It’s in a confused state (positively) of becoming—ready to be pulled for a fitting, yet also an archaic object. The staples-as-stitching propose an aggressive, immediate fix. Maybe the gown ripped, and before walking down the aisle, an assistant stapled skin. There’s a profound absence in the piece: an absence of an experience that happened long ago or maybe won’t happen at all. On a site visit, the artist told me the dress reflects pressures—familial, social—to get married, and the fears she may never embark on that traditional female rite of passage.
In the back, Michelle Grabner has a knack for coaxing the ordinary into the glinting sacrosanct. The sculptures on the floor at the back are a surprise house-party guest; one who maybe wasn’t invited but lovingly welcomed upon arrival. A doorstop is a disruption next to the immortalized ceramic cleaning supplies; a measure to keep a conversation open, like when one is departing a house and has their foot slightly in the door (but their body is angled out). There’s a romance towards the labor history; a beauty seeking demystification in scrubbing the final soap suds from the previously murky sink.
To the side, Carmen Neely’s Remember is a ripped diary entry, petrified in its moment of creation but excavated for the present. The lithograph is brainstorming sketches tracing existential dread. The text ranges from half-cursive scriptures such as “Your work will survive this” and “You will survive this.” The final statement on the right leaflet-made-lithograph is a ligature. It echoes reminisces in the show on the cruelty of stagnation: “The heaviest borders are clenched tightly…. Anticipating release by your own muscles.”
Threaded together (sorry, I know) are manifestations of utopia: I can’t help but think of automaton constructs, post-human musings, or retrospections on a past that unfurls into a questionable future. The group exhibition becomes a reckoning in this way, resonating with Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). The artworks operate as fictions blended with social reality, where science fiction tangles with societal oppression. Haraway wrote that the women’s movements of the late 20th century were key in unearthing a collective consciousness of resistance within tight seams, and the cyborg metaphor liberates through “imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.”[2] The real and the socially constructed become an “optical illusion,” and the cyborg embodies an “intimacy with a power” not born from the history of sexuality (cue Foucault, of course). In this way, the exhibition draws on material manipulations rooted in traditional craft—sewing, quasi-ceramics, printmaking—to conjure an uncanny, future female body basking in dangerous glamor.
Connective Thread lurches towards luxury, rooted in a morose meditation. While there are harbingers of despair contained in the gallery (a runaway bride, for example), they showcase a solace in standing resolutely. It’s almost ritual, almost kink: a slow summoning that borders on spellcasting. It purports to be a fix of the ways women are viewed in an all-consuming patriarchy. But it becomes a stitched revenge salute in the end; an acknowledgement and a wink, like when you rough scrub a coarse edge to get a glinting smoothness. Smoothing the rough edge doesn’t provide it autonomy; perhaps accentuating the seam does.
Check out the closing reception of Connective Thread on Friday, June 6th, 5:00 – 8:00 PM at Ivory Gate Gallery (Chicago, IL). You can also view the exhibition by appointment on June 7th and 8th.
[1] Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Seattle: Wave Books, 2009. P. 12.
[2] Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late 20th Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. P. 6.