A sort of bull's-eye marks the center of "A Sense of Place" at the Art Alliance — Pat Hickman's wall-filling installation Circumambulate, concentric circles like rings echoing out from a stone dropped in water. These are delineated by jagged "river teeth" (spiky, water-worn branches) encased in parchment-like pig gut. The gut dries taut, crisp and translucent, and in some places the pieces of wood are replaced by empty shells of gut, like giant cicada casings.
Seven distinct visions of location complement Hickman's. Curator Bruce Hoffman says the show, one of 40 organized for the important biennial FiberPhiladelphia, explores ways we think about place. Is it landscape? Is it historical? Is it home?
On the "home" front, Amy Orr's witty but disturbingly topical House of Cards (below) is, as the title suggests, a doll-sized house made of plastic credit cards. This detailed and substantial dollhouse, with a lawn of green cards and exterior walls of white ones, is open on one side to reveal individually furnished rooms and their inhabitants.
A transcendental and more visually traditional representation of nature is found in atmospheric landscapes by Barbara Lee Smith, collaged from painted textiles and completed with decorative stitching. Smith's painterly, meticulous execution and rich sense of color is an almost shocking contrast to Ke-Sook Lee's neighboring installation of a hammock made from the green rags of Army nurses' uniforms used in Vietnam, materials found at an Army surplus store. Though Lee has heavily altered them, each remains a record of the individual wearer's experiences. Green Hammock (above) is a reference to Lee's own experience as a child in Korea during the Korean War, and the tiny bits of material suspended from fragile threads speak of instability and the impossibility of relaxation.
Like Smith, Wendeanne Ke'aka Stitt pieces and quilts fabric in an essentially two-dimensional approach. Her work is also serene, but the similarity ends there. Stitt uses Hawaiian kappa (bark cloth) and works from a Hawaiian tradition of geometric abstraction and contrasting lights and darks, making for an individual, non-rectangular shape on the wall.
Dutch artist Marian Bijlenga's pieces aggregate multiple perimeters. Here, delicate, hairy, bracelet-like shapes with auras of fragile thread fringe vaguely resemble long, thin centipedes biting their tails. Mounted slightly away from the wall, each casts a precise, mirror-like shadow, describing a thicker hollow line. Charming and undemanding in presence, they could suggest cells or bubbles in water.
Marcia Docter's dense, demanding and brilliantly colored embroideries stand out as incredibly labor-intensive even in a collection of fiber and textile artwork, a field noted for obsessive attention to detail. Kabuki theatre and comic books are two of her influences, and Docter sometimes spells out the thoughts of the characters she's appropriated via dense embroidery in caustic language: "Don't Fuck with Me; I Have PMS and I Am Armed" with an image of the Statue of Liberty, for example. Bhakti Ziek's use of language is contrastingly poetic — place names like "Philadelphia" and "Takoma Park" are sometimes almost immersed (though still perfectly legible) in her sparkling, beautiful jacquard surfaces, giving the viewer the option of appreciating her work with the left or the right brain.
The temporal references in this show are as varied as the sense of place: historic, traditional, contemporary and seasonal. Putting it all together, though, when you have the time, the Art Alliance is the place to see memorable and important fiber work.
"A Sense of Place," through April 21, Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th St., 215-545-4302, philartalliance.org.
