Malleable Pursuits of Protection: Sarah Nance + Shelley Socolofsky

Exhibition Details

Malleable Pursuites of Protection: Sarah Nance and Shelley Socolofsky

October 5-31, 2020

AB Gallery
Art Building, 1st floor
2000 SW 5th Ave
Portland OR 97201

Sidewalk viewing through the AB Lobby Gallery windows 24/7

Eventbrite TIckets
 

This installation is a multi-sensorial, non-hierarchical project which includes two large scale handwoven tapestries, a selection of photographs and prints, and a sonic projection. An examination into the power of human agency, this project is a collaboration between interdisciplinary artists Shelley Socolofsky and Sarah Nace. The tapestries displayed draw from colonial narratives that are rewritten, through weaving, and through the use of loaded materials, as a strategy to subvert and flatten hierarchies.

This exhibition is in conjunction with this year's Portland Textile Month, focused on the theme of Repair and Reuse and featuring installations, virtual lectures, and distributed community projects throughout Portland.

Curatorial Statement

Clothing, shelter, body bags, shrouds; textiles are made for protecting. Shelley Socolofsky and Sarah Nance expand on associations of textiles and protection in works that engage gestures of ritualized hand labor and textiles in an expanded field.

Mimicking the attentive action of “mending,” Socolofsky weaves large scale tapestries. Narrative in form, these storied works mine colonial histories, inverting and reimagining them a strategies for equalizing and leveling power dynamics. Woven from discarded and deconstructed materials gathered from the body and the home, these ‘prayer rugs’ act as beacons and talismanic protectors for the soul.

Nance explores the ‘shroud’ through a multi-disciplinary practice. Fragile glass nets, sonic voice aria’s, and prints, these shrouds operate as coverings for archived landscapes and for those in the process of becoming disappeared.

About the Artists

Sarah Nance is an interdisciplinary artist based in installation and fiber. She works within the chasm between geologic processes and human experience, locating their entanglements in order to explore a layered perception of place. In her current site- responsive work, she creates shrouds for “archived” landscapes— environments, such as former inland seas, that are now observable only through fossil records, artifacts or recorded data. The shrouds vary from handworked textiles to experimental vocal performances, acting as momentary surface layers that point to the complex records of deep time within the geo-anthropic landscape.

Nance is currently Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Art at SMU in Dallas, TX. She has previously held professorships in Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University (Montréal, QC) and Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA). Nance participated in consecutive artist residencies in Reykjavík and Skagaströnd, Iceland in 2013; much of her research continues to be based in Iceland and northern coastal regions of Canada and theUS.

www.sarahnance.com

Shelley Socolofsky is an interdisciplinary artist based in installation and fiber. Her work explores the intersection of images, pattern, folklore, and archeology, elements used as platforms to examine and challenge expansionist narratives, replacing them with speculative landscapes. Recently returned from an artist residency in Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy where her research examined the interdependence of the body (social, spiritual, physical) with the local landscape, her work continues to utilize the gesture and practice of textile construction as a metaphor and strategy of mending, ritual, and repair.

Currently on the art faculties of Portland State University and Portland Community College, Socolofsky previously held professorships at Oregon College of Art & Craft and PNCA/OCAC's AC&D graduate programming. She is currently the President of American Tapestry Alliance, an international non- profit textile organization with membership representing over 28 countries. Shelley is based in Portland, Oregon.

shelleysocolofsky.com