Material Matters

Allison Cooke Brown, Daydream, 2006
Allison Cooke Brown, Daydream, 2006

Allison Cooke Brown, Ghost Dress, 2006
Allison Cooke Brown, Ghost Dress, 2006

Allison Cooke Brown, Set of Four, 2006
Allison Cooke Brown, Set of Four, 2006

Amy Robinson, Kleenex Quilt (detail), 2006
Amy Robinson, Kleenex Quilt (detail), 2006

Amy Robinson, Kleenex Quilt (detail), 2006
Amy Robinson, Kleenex Quilt (detail), 2006

Alex Sax, Installation View, Menagerie Recovery, 2006
Alex Sax, Installation View, Menagerie Recovery, 2006

Alex Sax, Menagerie Recovery, Turtle Migration (detail), 2006
Alex Sax, Menagerie Recovery, Turtle Migration (detail), 2006

Alex Sax, Installation View, Menagerie Recovery, 2006
Alex Sax, Installation View, Menagerie Recovery, 2006

Allison Cooke Brown, Amy Robinson,
and Alex Sax

PLEASE JOIN US FOR THE
ARTIST RECEPTION:
FIRST FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3 5-8 pm

The exhibition continues from October 11th to November 18th, 2006.

This autumn, artists Allison Cooke Brown, Amy Robinson, and Alex Sax, transform Whitney Art Works into an unexpected repository for resuscitated materials. With expertise in traditional techniques of needlepoint, paper making, sewing, and drawing, these artists manipulate materials into works that defy easy explanation. Playing fast and loose with memory, fiction, and fantasy, the artists use the York Street site to display a series of works in which the familiar is made strange. Kleenex quilts and subversive stitching share the gallery space with an improvised animal infirmary. Antique linens and found photographs take on new life while discarded items are meticulously saved and resurrected through painstaking processes of re-assemblage.

Linked by a shared capability in the careful hand-building of objects, Cooke Brown, Robinson, and Sax nevertheless construct highly individualized works which investigate material matters important to each of them. Known for her exquisite box constructions, Cooke Brown continues her taxonomic obsession with practices of collecting, naming, and numbering through works such as �7 Deadly Virtues� and �Things That I�m Not�. She says of her recent projects: �I am noticing that much of my work consists of repetition, both in structure � making multiples � or in activities such as ripping or shredding or sewing. My list-making is a form of counting or enumerating words.�

Sharing certain affinities with Cooke Brown�s use of fiber, textiles and found materials, Sax engages in an even more elaborate demonstration of taxonomic play. Her Menagerie Recovery is a mixed media project centered on an ongoing series of small animal sculptures. The animals are displayed as recently recovered, rare and endangered species that were part of nineteenth and early twentieth-century menageries. Small and intimate, the animals are based more on memory than on observation. �The works display an element of the homemade,� says Sax, �but with a high polish. I am always balancing between artifice and reality, the fabricated and the phantasmagoric.�

The compulsion to fabricate, to construct or alter the shape of materials as a �private practice of the daily affirmation of self� in some way inflects the work of all the artists. For Robinson this element is key, particularly in the assemblage of her large scale Kleenex quilt. Treating each square as a space to imprint �all the mental, interior, and exterior noise,� the artist transforms an
ephemeral material into more substantial object. �The ease of throwing away the Kleenex,� says Robinson, �combined with the preserved and immortal bits of memory, guilt, worry, stress, and possibility gives the structure levity, mobility, and strength.�

Giving new structure to the everyday stuff of their worlds is how artists Allison Cooke Brown, Amy Robinson, and Alex Sax continue to make materials matter.


For more information contact Deb Whitney at Whitney Art Works, 45 York Street, Portland, Maine,04101. Telephone 207-780-0700 or email at deb@whitneyartworks.com.


© Whitney Art Works, All Rights Reserved. 45 York Street, Portland, Maine 04101 Voice: 207-780-0700

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