Featured Essay
In a photograph of a protest outside the Brooklyn Museum in the 1960s, an anonymous woman stands in a crowd with her back toward the viewer, her face entirely invisible to us as she directs her attention to the doors of the museum. She wears a long, knitted poncho, over which a sign is draped on her back, reading: BROOKLYN MUSEUM / AFTER 100 YEARS AT LAST…A ONE WOMAN SHOW / THAT’S DISCRIMINATION. This castigation is bookended, above and below, by one of the few clear details of the woman’s sweater as registered in this black-and-white image: the women’s symbol—a circle atop a cruciform—proceeds in two bands, one made up of smaller such signs and running across the woman’s shoulders and the other larger and located toward the bottom of the garment.
Of the many comparable knitwear pieces commonly worn by twentieth-century feminist protestors, none have been institutionally preserved. In this respect, the photograph captures a lost object—an object discarded, omitted from the archive. This elision is the point of departure for Portland-based artist Ellen Lesperance, who seeks through her multimedia practice to restore to these objects—and moreover to the subjects and histories that they embody—visibility and, ultimately, materiality. Fist, among Lesperance’s similar works in gouache, represents a first step, as well as an intermediary and a tool, in that process.
The 2014 painting takes as its source the photograph of the Brooklyn Museum protest. Viewers versed in Symbolcraft, the universal language of knitters, will identify a legible pattern from which to create a poncho like the one in the photograph. The two vertically oriented rectangles that overlap in the visual field correspond to the two sides of the draping garb, and each of the meticulously rendered squares represents a stitch.
The overlapping rectangular forms signal how the sweater in question would fit on the body. Lesperance’s patterns based on knitwear worn by the activists of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp—a series of woman-led protests against nuclear arms in the United Kingdom between 1981 and 2000—often invoke the body even more explicitly, resembling its form.1 The artist has noted, “As I began gathering together more and more examples of Greenham Common knitwear, I realized that, through these garments’ designs, one could literally study the Peace Camp women’s adoption and interpretation of…symbolism upon their protesting bodies.”2 On this level, the gouaches can be understood as figurations of the body and as an extension of the artist’s training in figurative oil painting, with its fraught relationship to the representation of female subjects. They explore an alternate language for figuring women and, through a pointed focus on activist subjects, their interventions in the world.
With her choice of medium, however, Lesperance situates her patterns within the longer history of illustrative practice and specifically within Bauhaus color theories, like that of Josef Albers, who deemed color the single most relative quality in art.3 This observation offers us a lens through which to recognize the character of Fist as an interpretation—rather than a reproduction or reconstruction—of Lesperance’s sweater-model, the artist having been tasked with inventing a color scheme, among other details, in translating a black-and-white photograph into the rich palette of gouache. Similarly, were multiple sweaters produced using Fist as a pattern, each one would vary in some way. Aside from the normal idiosyncrasies of objects knitted by hand, no instructions accompany the patterns, and thus the prospective viewer-turned-maker would have to personally select the yarn weight and brand, the latter entailing a fixed set of color options, and so forth—all of this opening up the potential for a wide array of outcomes.
While the indeterminate quality of Lesperance’s paintings underscores their rooting in Conceptual Art, it should be observed that the material object in fact plays a central role within the artist’s larger, multimedia practice. In some cases, Lesperance uses her own pattern to knit a sweater that, in an installation context, becomes not simply a counterpart to the paintings but the fruition of a process of materializing the lost sweater, staging it in time and space.4 In this respect, Lesperance’s work can be understood as an inversion of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the loss of the original. Benjamin described the stripping away of aesthetic singularity, or aura, from the art object as it came to be routinely reproduced in technologies such as film and photography.5 However, as the unpreserved corpus of feminist sweaters emblematizes, sometimes the original is “lost” precisely because culture never assigned it value to begin with. Lesperance works backwards from this loss, taking as a starting point an ethereal reproduction in a photograph, moving through concept and pattern, and ultimately actualizing the sweaters as art objects, possessive of materiality and aura.
Making and craft play an important role in this project of ascribing aesthetic value to the sweaters. The remarkably time-consuming working process entailed in knitting these, as compared to rendering their patterns in gouache, is devotional in character. And despite the invitation latent in the painting, namely, to reproduce the sweater at will, the outcome of this careful labor by hand would necessarily be unique and singular.
The installation choices reflected in Lesperance’s 2021–22 solo show at ICA Miami underscore this trajectory latent in her work. Whereas previous displays have tended to present the finished sweaters folded on open shelving directly beneath their corresponding patterns, here they are housed individually in vitrines. Ensconced like this, they become characterized by their inaccessibility to the viewer, affecting the distance indispensable to the production of aura. A further strategy of removal and enshrinement is evident in the way each sweater is tightly bundled in its vitrine, inviting a parallel to the way in which relics were staged during the Gothic period, visible in their reliquaries through rock-crystal windows yet entirely wrapped in fabric. Enclosed in a comparable way, the sweaters become vessels for potentiality. Their freestanding placement, well out from the wall, further emphasizes their location in time and space: figuring long-effaced subjects and histories, they elicit a devotional gaze.
1. See, for example, the 2019 works XOXOXOX and Greenham Women Are Everywhere.
2. Ellen Lesperance, “Introduction,” in Velvet Fist, published on the occasion of the solo exhibition Ellen Lesperance: Velvet Fist at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 5.
3. See Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), x.
4. See the installation views at https://hollybushgardens.co.uk/artists/ellen-lesperance/.
5. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1935.