WOMEN AND WEAVING

Polly Apfelbaum, Ariel Dill, Michelle Grabner

24 June – 24 July, 2011

SOUTHFIRST is proud to present “Women and Weaving,” an exhibition of new paintings, silverpoint-, goldpoint- and graphite-on-board pieces, and works on paper by Polly Apfelbaum, Ariel Dill and Michelle Grabner. The show is on view from 24 June – 24 July, 2011.

“Weaving” in the work of these three female artists can connote both the textile support of painting and the squares of a minimalist grid. Taking the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s show “Sonia Delunay: Color Moves” as a jumping off point, the show looks at work by three contemporary artists whose practice explicitly examines the representation of weaving in two-dimensional media.

Polly Apfelbaum's wall of 52 drawings, “Wavvy Gravvy (Weaving Lines Summer of 2011),” was composed with a systematic application of line marks--jagged, wavy, straight, and softly s-curved, combined with a chance use of color. Reminiscent of fabric design swatches replete with selvedge, they explicitly speak to Sonia Delunay’s legacy and the procedural composition of conceptual art. Ariel Dill’s oil paintings evoke embroidery, batik woven fabric and African textiles. In “Orange Peel,” indigo and yellow stains alternate; “Alteration’s” brushy dots hover between embroidery and pointellist facture, while “Untitled (Yellow Edges)” presents an Indonesian weave with radiant edges. Michelle Grabner’s works on panel foreground the process of their laborious creation: tight goldpoint drawings indicate the lattice of basketry, while silverpoint warp and weft and graphite grids are increasingly geometric. The works range from crafty to minimal.

Polly Apfelbaum has been showing consistently in New York and abroad since her firstvone-person show in New York 1986. A major mid-career survey of her work opened in 2003 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern of Art, The Whitney Museum of Art of American Art, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ariel Dill (b. 1976, Los Angeles), has had solo shows with Neverwork, a two-person show at Southfirst and recently curated the exhibition “Tide Pool” with Denise Kupferschmidt at Sara Meltzer gallery. Her paintings are currently on view at ZieherSmith in “Grasping for Relics,” organized by Patrick Brennan. Michelle Grabner’s abstract work consists of repetitious vocabulary and simple mathematical ordering. Barry Schwabsky writes that, “Her paintings refer to the traditionally feminine realm of the domestic by way of the metaphorically loaded imagery of fabrics and textiles--not only blankets and curtains but rugs, clothing, and so on.” Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Contemporary, New Art Examiner, Art Issues.

SOUTHFIRST, founded in 2000, is located at 60 N6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn between Wythe and Kent Avenues. Gallery hours are Saturday and Sunday from 1-6 PM and by appointment. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact Maika Pollack at 718 599 4884 or info@southfirst.org.