Frances Trombly - Material and its Making
February 27-April 30, 2016
Opening Reception February 27th 5-7pm
Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Material and its Making a new exhibition by Frances Trombly. This is the artist’s second show with the gallery. In her work, Trombly has focused on making textiles by hand to represent often ephemeral and disposable industrial objects. She began to pare down the role of detail and color in her 2010-2011 series of handwoven canvas paintings, a shift that emphasized the sculptural and conceptual field of her work. The minimalism also allowed space to consider the importance of the breaks and shifts in the textiles.
In her latest work these variables within the fiber open up the conversation about the fabrication process: irregularity, asymmetry, glitches, pulls, and tears reveal the manual labor of weaving, standing in contrast to the industrial perfection of commercial cloth and emphasizing the artists intimacy with the material.
With no work wider than the width of her loom, there is a re-introduction of color and a new acceptance of the cloth as the work itself. Considering this focus on the material and its making, the works contain a timeline of their own construction, a transcription of the gestures of working and constructing a structure in space. As Trombly works, mistakes are left and patterns are switched as errors dictate, allowing a composition to build through unforeseen events in the process. The color is also woven in the process, but the fiber used is dyed far in advance and usually produces irregularly colored material. As she works, those irregularities reveal themselves and produce organic striations in the woven color fields.
These purely textile forms, rest, drape, and stretch on a series of industrial structures as a way to amplify the sculptural quality of the fabric. Scaffolding, wooden stretchers, and plywood pedestals subtley act as a departing reference to the textile as stretched canvas for painting. Here Trombly pushes the textile beyond just another material to sustain the art and into the "canvas" taking its overdue role as the work on its own.
Frances Trombly has exhibited at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; Prosjektrom Normanns, Stavanger, Norway; Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA; and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY. Her work can be found in the Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL, and the University of Maine, Museum of Art, Bangor, ME. She is a co-founder and co-director of Dimensions Variable, an artist-run exhibition space in Miami.
For more information contact Alana Parpal alana@shoshanawayne.com
