Indira Allegra, Samantha Bittman, Julia Bland, Diedrick Brackens, Pip Brant, Moira Holohan, Laura Marsh, Elaine Reichek, Carrie Sieh, Frances Trombly, Margo Wolowiec
Art Week Reception:Friday, December 8,9 am—12 noon
A Thread of Execution
A Thread of Execution presents the work of artists who work primarily with textiles and attempts to link the threads of weaving and fabric to the threads of digital code. The exhibition illustrates similarities in processes between two vastly different working systems that share several common attributes.
In computer science, A Thread of Execution is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently by the operating system. The implementation of threads and processes differs between operating systems, but a thread refers to a single component of a system’s process. The layering of executing threads ultimately produce commands which make software possible.
When thinking about these sequences that build layer upon layer of digital instructions, a link emerges between lines of code and threads of a piece of fabric. Threads in both systems are laid in a sequence to build a structure. This structure becomes a larger organism in the form of a web or fabric form made up of hundreds of thousands if not millions of lines. These forms, for example, may render imagery in similar ways using a cross-section of grids like the warp and weft of the loom or the digital light pixel grid on a video monitor. The metaphors between the two systems are many and not always obvious, but the connections to how humans have been making things for millennia is quite striking. These connections shed light on the building blocks of mathematics and its influence across centuries on our ability to design complex structures.
A Thread of Execution also brings awareness not only to the connections between these two systems but their forgotten histories. From twenty thousand years ago when women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. To the women mathematicians who pioneered the foundations for computer code.
Special thanks to Jessica Silverman Gallery, Steve Turner, and Stellar Projects for their support with this exhibition.
Indira Allegra
Indira Allegra works with tension as creative material through sculpture, installation and text/ile performance. She is a recipient of the Oakland Individual Artist (2015) and Queer Cultural Center grants (2014) and has been honored with the Windgate Craft Fellowship (2015), Jackson Literary Award (2014) and Lambda Literary Fellowship (2012). Allegra’s commissions include works for SFMOMA, de Young Museum, The Wattis Institute, City of Oakland, SFJAZZ Poetry Festival and the National Queer Arts Festival. She has screened at festivals such as MIX NYC (2013), Hannover LGBT Festival (2010), Bologna Lesbian Film Festival (2010) and Outfest Fusion (2009). In 2014 she was the Dr. and Mrs. Ella Tag Lecturer at East Carolina University and a Lylle Parker Women of Color Speaker at the University of Oregon. Allegra has completed residencies at The Banff Centre in Canada (2012), Ponderosa Center in Stolzenhagen (2016), Takt in Berlin (2016) and Headlands Center for the Arts (2017). She is a KQED ‘Woman to Watch’ and Artist in Residence at Djerassi Residence Arts Program.
Samantha Bittman
Bittman received her B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. She has participated in residency programs at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Ox-Bow School of Art. She is currently a participant in the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include, Picture Structure at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Number Cruncher at Longhouse Projects, New York, NY; and Soft Counting, at Greenpoint Terminal, Brooklyn, NY. She has been included in recent group exhibitions at Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY; David Castillo Gallery, Miami, FL; Shane Campbell Gallery; and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL. She is currently on faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Julia Bland
Julia Bland earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and her MFA from Yale in 2012. She has been an artist in residence at Lighthouse Works, The Sharpe-Walentas Space Program, Yaddo, The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and been awarded The Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship, The Carol Scholsberg Memorial Prize, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust Travel Fellowship, and the Florence Leif Award. Her work has been exhibited at On Stellar Rays, Miller Contemporary, The NYU Institute of Fine Arts, Ortega Y Gasset, and Asya Geisberg Gallery in NYC, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, CES Gallery in Los Angeles, Porsesh Institute (Anahita Gallery) in Tehran, and Motus Fort in Tokyo.
Diedrick Brackens
Los Angeles-based Diedrick Brackens makes weavings that incorporate techniques drawn from European tapestries, West African weavings, and Southern quilts. Brackens has worked through political protest and personal pain in creating compositions that incorporate joy, pleasure, and imagination. He has had solo exhibitions at Johansson Projects in Oakland, Conduit Gallery in Dallas, and Pacific Sky Gallery in Eugene. His works have been included in group exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, SOMArts in San Francisco, and Work Gallery at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, among others.
Pip Brant
Pip Brant has degrees from the University of Montana (BFA) and the University of Wyoming. (MFA). Brant grew up on the western Plains Indian reservations (Sioux, Cheyenne, Assiniboine) where the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Public Health employed her family. She has taught, herded goats and produced art in Montana, Wyoming, London, England, and Missouri and in 1999 moved to Florida to take a studio teaching position at Florida International University. She has exhibited in Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, and London as well as nationally, including venues in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, as well as the western states. Recently she has been exhibiting in the Basel Art Fair affiliated Ping Pong exhibitions that feature artists from Switzerland /LA/Miami.
Moira Holohan
Moira Holohan was born and raised in New York, NY. She holds a B.A. with a concentration in Painting from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY and an MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY, where she was the recipient of the Tom Wood Award. Holohan was awarded the Tigertail Production Artist Access Grant in 2014 to support her artist in residence at the Hangar art space in Barcelona this past summer. She was recently part of The Fringe Project (Art Days in Downtown Miami), curated by Amanda Sanfilippo and the New Work Miami 2013 exhibition at the Perez Art Museum Miami co-curated by René Morales and Diana Nawi. Moira Holohan’s work has been exhibited in Miami: The Fringe Projects, Art Days in Downtown Miami, Miami-Dade College Museum of Art + Design, Perez Art Museum Miami, Frost Art Museum, Optic Nerve: MoCA North Miami, Art and Cultural Center of Hollywood, Art Center South Florida, The De la Cruz Collection, Girls Club (on-line exhibition), The Deering Estate, and General Practice. In New York: Regina Rex. Greene County Council on the Arts, Steuben Gallery (Pratt Institute) and the AC Institute.
Laura Marsh
Laura Marsh is textile artist with an expanded practice. She defines spaces for viewers to engage with tactile objects, poetic phrases, and social experiences. Her weavings contain social mottos, and immersive environments hold communal space for viewers to gather and communicate about class and social practice. Marsh supports the production of site-specific installation as a form of advocacy, and she activates unused sites. Concerned with economic contradictions within institutions and social structures, Marsh speaks about how artists can create capital and value their own production. She is a current artist in residence at ArtCenter South Florida in Miami Beach and the Curator of Exhibitions at the Art and Culture Center in Hollywood. Marsh received her MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. She is from a working class family in Montrose, Pennsylvania, which is now a fracking region that has suffered from economic depression. From two generations of sewers, Marsh believes in the DIY and establishing a work ethic that explores social narratives. Marsh has exhibited nationally at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter, Field Projects, Newman Popiashvili Gallery, and Tilton Gallery in NY.
Elaine Reichek
Reichek lives and works in New York, and has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad for nearly forty years, including solo exhibitions at: New York’s Museum of Modern Art and The Jewish Museum; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Tel Aviv Museum; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Her work is in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Jewish Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Arts and Design, and the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, Florida; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, among others.
Carrie Sieh
Carrie Sieh’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and collected internationally. Exhibition locations include Miami International Airport, the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book, the Coral Gables Museum, MDC Museum of Art & Design, Charles Deering Estate, the Art & Culture Center of Hollywood, and David Castillo Gallery. Collections include Bernice Steinbaum (Miami), Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz (Ft. Lauderdale FL), Kathryn Grody & Mandy Patinkin (NYC), the James Hotel (Miami Beach), Hotel 21c (Louisville KY), and private collections in the United States and Uruguay. Sieh received a BA in Art, with a double focus in painting and photography, from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her subsequent Master’s degree in Library and Information Science, from San Jose State University in California, informs the technological themes often present in her work.
Frances Trombly
Frances Trombly was born in 1976 in Miami, FL where she currently lives and works. She received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. Selected exhibitions consist of Frances Trombly: Over and Under at Locust Projects, Miami, included in Americana: Formalizing Craft, Perez Art Museum Miami and united states, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Her work has been featured in various publications including The New York Times, Art Papers, Sculpture Magazine, Surface Design Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. Trombly’s work is in permanent collections of the Perez Art Museum Miami and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida among other institutions. She is represented by Emerson Dorsch, Miami, FL and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA. Frances also co-directs Dimensions Variable, an artist-run exhibition space in Miami, FL.
Margo Wolowiec
Margo Wolowiec (b. 1985, Dearborn, MI) lives and works in Detroit, MI. She has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the California College of the Arts. Her work is in the public collections of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, Arsenal Contemporary Art Center in Montreal, and the Detroit Center for Photography. She has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco), di Rosa Center (Napa), Jessica Silverman Gallery (San Francisco), Laura Bartlett Gallery (London) and Lisa Cooley Gallery (New York). She was a panelist at the Helen Frankenthaler institute in Manhattan for the Material Concerns and Current Practices series, and has lectured at Maryland Institute College of the Arts, San Francisco State University, and Penland School of Arts. She was a visiting critic at California College of the Arts and the Textile Art Center in Brooklyn, NY.
