Margo Wolowiec “Corrections and Exposures”

Lisa Cooley Fine Art

poster for Margo Wolowiec “Corrections and Exposures”

This event has ended.

Margo Wolowiec makes textiles of images found on the Internet. There is usually more than one image per work and the subjects are often unrecognizable. Occasional hand painted marks appear throughout the pieces. Individually and as a body of work, Wolowiec’s textiles chart the vagaries of nostalgia and desire that structure the production and consumption of images in the digital era. Using digital photographs culled from public sources — an unceasingly growing mass of visual information that is as unfathomable as it is overwhelming — Wolowiec counters new modes of visualization with the mechanical logic of two endangered technologies: the handloom and the darkroom.

In the darkroom, an exposure is an act revelation. The initial results are almost never perfect; adjustments need to be made, errors rectified. Getting to the finished print requires working through an incremental series of corrections, a process that leaves behind an accumulation of similar, but uniquely flawed images, each with their own claims to the truth. After settling on a final image, however, the photographer would typically destroy the test proofs, or file them away someplace where they would never be seen again.
Margo Wolowiec collects these discarded images. Physically, in the form of annotated trail proofs, contact sheets and exposure tests, and digitally via photo sharing websites. In preparation for Corrections and Exposures, she specifically collected digital images of Joshua Tree and Big Sur (traced by their geo-tag and downloaded to her computer almost immediately after they were taken). For Wolowiec, who only recently moved from sunny California to not–so–sunny Brooklyn, these locations are loaded with both personal and cultural significance. She explains, “I chose to start collecting images from these two areas out of desire and nostalgia. They are places of grandeur with horizons that seem to continue on forever, and historically have both acted as ‘last frontiers.’ Big Sur is representative of the final edge of the American landscape, while the desert is a long forgotten place of homesteading that promised families an answer to the American dream.”

The works in Corrections and Exposures reveal the mythic grandeur of the California desert and the Pacific coast in fragmentary glimpses — bits of flora and fauna, a crashing wave, a streak of light, a transitory snapshot. Wolowiec transfers these images to her weft threads via a dye–sublimation ink process, a technique that involves heating the dye to the point that it permanently embeds itself into the pores of the fabric. The colored weft threads are then hand–woven with a cotton warp, which, in this series of works, is dyed various shades of gray. The different colored warp threads lend the final image the look of a traditional darkroom exposure test. In the finished textile, the original photographic image is highly mediated and barely legible. The process of weaving individual strands necessarily pulls the image out of register, causing it to blur. At the same time, the white cotton warp softens the image, making it appear diffuse and hazy. Painted corrective marks — checks, x’s and squiggles inspired by those found on photographic contact sheets — are applied as the weaving is taking place. The finished works are slow to make and slow to consume, a vast network of corrections and exposures given material form.

Margo Wolowiec lives and works in Brooklyn. She has had solo exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, and Johansson Projects, Oakland; and is currently included in La Mer Insomniaque, a three–person show with Natalie Häusler and Eric Sidner, at Laura Bartlett Gallery in London. She has lectured at Maryland Institute College of the Arts, Baltimore, and San Francisco State University, San Francisco. Margo received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

Media

Schedule

from February 22, 2015 to March 29, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-02-22 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Margo Wolowiec

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