Music For The End Of Time brings three contemporary artists together for the first time: Fanny Allié, China Marks and David B. Smith. All three artists have made fabrics and textiles central to their creative practice: Their distinct yet complementary voices allow us to contemplate their individuality in a new way, through the medium that they share. Together, the artists explore issues of construction and deconstruction, transcendence, identity, narrative, body and structure.
Fanny Allié transforms found pieces of fabric and other materials to create delicate assemblages that explore themes such as the body, belonging and deconstruction. Her single-plane creations balance emotive and opaque narratives, populated with characters that often blend into their environment. This relationship between characters and the structures they inhabit is central to her work. Allie’s choice of fabric fragments highlights their inherent patina of age, as do the exposed holes, dangling threads and other soft details of materiality.
China Marks creates hybrids of embroidery, drawing, and collage. Her dense process-driven creations can initially be described as drawing with thread into fabric fragments, with which she constructs twisted tales. Over time she builds up her creations by working and re-working thread upon thread, with fabric collage that is applied, removed, and reshaped. Combined with the addition of digitally embroidered sketches and text, the end result is a wondrous landscape filled with warped characters, dark humor and loaded narratives.
David B. Smith has a sculptural approach to textile art. He works with a number of forms, but often starts by distorting images through a pseudo programming code that distorts, fragments and rearranges the information into playful patterns. These image files are then fed to a digital loom. The resulting fabrics are then arranged into shapes that engage their own symmetries, or are torn and layered into trippy 3-dimensional constructions. The results are objects that can be unsettling, cozy and intriguing all at the same time.
