RE: ASSEMBLY | Francesca Capone, Sofía Clausse, Michelle Yi Martin, Lane Walkup

On view September 24–October 18, 2020
Reception Sunday, October 4 (11:00am–1:00pm) RSVP

Francesca Capone is a visual artist, writer, and materials designer. Her work is primarily concerned with the creation of materials and a poetic consideration of their meaning. She is interested in how tactile forms simultaneously serve as functional surfaces for daily life and as a mode of communication or symbol within the cultural paradigm. Capone has exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in London, LUMA/Westbau in Switzerland, Textile Arts Center in NYC, and 99¢ Plus Gallery in Brooklyn. She has published several books and has been an artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Andrea Zittel's A-Z West. Her academic work includes lectures and workshops at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Reed College, University of Washington, and Alberta College of Art and Design, among others. She is represented by Nationale (Portland, OR).

About the work presented:
A magical property of textile is its ability to be reconstructed, cut apart and put back together. Materials have memory: each cut of fabric carries history from a former life. Pushing towards a zero-waste practice, this new series is an effort to utilize personal scrap into visual/tactile objects that create new identities and narratives in their combination. Their reassembled forms come purely from intuition, there is no precise pattern to their combination, and the process is guided by feeling.

Sofía Clausse was born in Argentina and currently lives in the United Kingdom. She has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently doing a postgraduate at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Her practice grows in spirals – exploring questions of repetition, time, and translation, by using painting, paper, text, custom tools and systems.

About the work presented:
The paper tapestry, paper dishcloth, and sketchbook are works exploring Clausse’s current interest in textile objects and techniques. All these pieces use paper as the main material, and parallel lines as a constant gesture. These lines are developed from marks generated by custom-made tools, and as a result of her background and research on letterforms in typography. Paper Tapestry #2 explores different possibilities of what lines can be and can do; the black lines are like images of threads in woven materials, which combine to create a surface, which when cut becomes dimensional. The tassels are made from leftover scraps of paper used when making the piece. This conscious use and economy of material is also present in Paper Dishcloth, which was made during quarantine and with its limitations, using newsprint as it was an easily available material. By recreating universal, everyday products like these cleaning rags, Clausse reconsiders attention to humble textile objects. They hold a connection to home, yet are so universal in their design, pattern, and form, that they belong everywhere and nowhere. In her sketchbook, also on display, she begins with a simple paper weave in black and white, and then goes through experimentations with color, pattern, and collage, interweaving ideas and testing possibilities for what paper and line could be.

Michelle Yi Martin lives in San Francisco, but actively draws on her Korean immigrant roots in her practice. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and self-taught weaver, who characterizes her work as a conversation between convention, art, utility, adornment, material, light, solidity, and space. Most recently, Yi Martin received a grant by the Danish Arts Council to exhibit her monofilament sculptures in Aarhus, and she completed residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Textilsetur, and the Space Program before shelter-in-place. Additionally, she has exhibited at the Textile Center in Iceland and Luggage Gallery in San Francisco. Currently, Yi Martin is developing a series of work dedicated to reiterating woven structures in a series of light projections and reflections for an upcoming installation.

About the work presented:
The large weaving presented in the window of Nationale was created with acrylic light gels, cotton, and wool. It projects a beautiful mosaic of colorful light onto the white gallery walls and is part of a larger body of recent work which translates and reiterates woven structures by way of light, fiber, sound, and movement. Yi Martin compares her creative process to a possible movement with the body, a possible accompaniment to a song, to a dance. It responds to boundaries and to how a weaving may be experienced.

Lane Walkup is a sculptural artist based in Portland, OR, mainly found in her studio welding and bending steel into illustrative shapes. Walkup’s body of work ranges from large scale installations to small wearable forms. She recreates realities for everyday objects by stretching and forming textural materials over metal skeletons.

About the work presented:
The chair and shoes presented in the exhibition are steel sculptures covered by panty hose. Walkup’s process creating these is very organic and includes her visualizing the colors and properties she wants her pieces to have. This intuitive method has informed the materials she has been experimenting with as of late, as well as the color palette she chooses to give each object.

PRESS AND MORE
Saturday Selects, week of September 21, 2020, Sean Santiago, Sight Unseen
Exhibition featured on Art and About PDX
Portland Textile Month
VizArts Monthly: Flexible Viewing Options for Flexible Times, October 5, 2020, Lindsay Costello, Oregon ArtsWatch
Lusi Lukova’s reflections on RE: Assembly, October 12, 2020 (Nationale blog)