April 13th to April 25th, 2019
Parachute Factory, Lexington, KY
Patterning Resistance features artists, Becky Alley, Annette Lawrence, and Crystal Gregory, whose works are structured by a feminist approach to systems. They embody a tension between the fixity and fluidity of form—emphasizing materiality’s resistance to the precise articulation of the patterns that ostensibly determine them. Against masculinist systems of mastery, autonomy, and control, their work stress vulnerability, contingency, and co-production. Their starting points are systems that bind them to others (e.g., historical designs, personal data, and national statistics on violent crime). However, they materialize these patterns a manner that redirects their normative uses and produces dynamic reverberations. Locating patterns, examining them, and intervening in their structure, these artists transform them through processes resistant to the paths laid out before them.
For this show, Becky Alley’s has constructed an installation that meditates on researched statistics of domestic violence in Kentucky. Utilizing bed pillows and plaster to transform data points into physical manifestations of loss, she will create a large-scale memorial for the women killed by their intimate partners during the past year. Annette Lawrence presents a series of graphite drawings based on charts that document presence or absence of journal entries over a 25-year period. This personal data silhouette at once reveals the quantity of activity, while withholding the actual content, thus maintaining the privacy inherent in journaling. By offering viewers a chance to mine her data, but not grating them full access, Lawrence’s opaque autobiographical graphics confront the viewer with their own voyeuristic desire to see her private daily activity as well as a moment to reflect upon their connection to a particular moment in time. Crystal Gregory has produced a woven textile & concrete sculptural installation that considers how overlooked materials bind us. Inspired by the patterned threads that are left cascading out of the underside of the fabric in traditional “overshot” cloth, Gregory will utilize the seemingly inessential decorative threads to hold the weight and burden of the structure. Inviting local artists to work with her to tie the ends of the patterned threads together, they will together contemplate the question of what binds us to one another.
Curated by Miriam Kienle, Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Kentucky
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