A stitch in time: A bold, contemporary embroidery exhibition at Inhabit Galerie

CORRALES — If you live in New Mexico, you love art and you have not yet visited Inhabit Galerie, you are missing out. Go there ASAP. The owner, Marisa Ravalli, who curated contemporary exhibitions in Prague for many years, brings a worldly sophistication to her programming that makes Inhabit one of the finest galleries in the state. Although my Nov. 9 review of the Inhabit show “Realms of Seduction” was fairly critical, the curatorial ideas in that show were still worth grappling with, and much of the art was beautiful and thought-provoking. As far as the current show, “Stitches,” is concerned, I have nothing to criticize.

“Stitches” presents work by seven contemporary artists who use embroidery, yet none of the work looks the same. Some of the artists embroider on fancy linen handkerchiefs, others on bandanas. One, Doris Kapner, embroiders with ribbons and beads on glazed ceramic. The work is not reducible to a single method or message — there is significant diversity in both thought and execution — but many of the artists play on stereotypes of embroidery as “feminine” or “old-fashioned,” either by subverting those stereotypes or reframing them as virtues.

Kathy Halper’s “Friend Me” series from 2011 feature loose, hand-stitched images of her then-teenage daughters, taken from photos they posted to their social media accounts. Like the hand-stitched bric-á-brac collages Victorian housewives assembled into scrapbooks in the 19th century — precursors to the scrapbooking trends of today — Halper’s “Friend Me” pieces have a sweet, doting, motherly energy. The teenagers, by contrast, exhibit strains of rebelliousness — flipping off the camera or passing out on couches — that would have shocked the Victorians. The contrast between the daughters’ frank self-expression and their mother’s sentimental representation in a consciously antiquated format creates a complex, multilayered narrative of mother-daughter relations. It also reveals just how much motherhood and adolescence have both changed since the Victorian era.

An “oubliette,” derived from the French word “oublier,” meaning “to forget,” was a type of medieval dungeon where prisoners were abandoned to die of starvation. Oubliettes typically had only one opening — a trap door in the ceiling — and no exit. The people thrown into them were literally forgotten. For “Oubliette I,” Kate Kretz has painstakingly embroidered an antique linen handkerchief with her own hair to create a photorealistic image of an open mouth with a mushroom cloud inside.

In the face of nuclear obliteration, Kretz mounts a fourfold defense of human dignity and tenderness: the image of a mouth, the presence of real human hair, the conscientiousness of the artist’s delicate handiwork and the care involved in preserving antique linen. Humanity is fragile, Kretz suggests, and artifacts of human culture, which may take months or years to produce and centuries of conservation to maintain, can be destroyed in one horrible instant. Yet we must carry on, producing and preserving, despite our uncertain fate.

When the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer observed the first nuclear test, he remembered an episode from the Hindu scripture, the “Bhagavad Gita,” where the main character’s charioteer and friend, Krishna, reveals himself to be God. In his “cosmic form,” Krishna looks like an enormous gaping mouth, swallowing entire galaxies. The hero of the epic then pleads with Krishna to return to his gentle, human form, and Krishna obliges. The terrifying cosmic truth is forgotten, and the two go back to being friends.

Kretz’s “Oubliette I” presents a similar vision of sublime terror, which may be remembered or forgotten as one wishes. Fold the handkerchief, place it in a pocket or a drawer, and the gaping mouth of nuclear destruction closes. Open it, and the terror returns.

Continuing with the French theme, Sharon Kivland has used red silk thread to embroider the words “ma lorette” and “ma grisette” onto women’s antique French linen handkerchiefs. One might assume these mellifluous-sounding words are cute pet names for girlfriends, since high-society youngsters in 19th century Paris often carried around monogrammed handkerchiefs and gave them to one another as signs of affection. As it turns out, “lorettes” and “grisettes” were two types of 19th century French sex workers, the former being the higher status of the two. Kivland undercuts any nostalgia we might feel for 19th century courtship rituals with this simple conceptual intervention. Her “scarlet letters,” like the one Hester Prynne is forced to wear in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, are a reminder — in case we needed reminding — that the prefeminist past was never a rosy place for women.

Multicolored embroidered bandanas in the work of Piper Pelligrini and John Thomas Paradiso allude to the “hanky code” used by gay men in the 1970s to communicate their desires in a time of social repression. Like the “language of flowers” used by heterosexual couples in Victorian England, the semiotics of hankies allowed for silent communication between like-minded, would-be lovers when speaking openly in public could lead to ostracization, or worse.

The popularity of handkerchiefs, which were everywhere in the 19th century, declined steeply in the 1930s after Kleenex — “the handkerchief you can throw away” — launched an aggressive marketing campaign touting the hygienic benefits of disposable tissues. Today, handkerchiefs — especially embroidered ones — are emblems of a bygone era. Even bandanas are not as popular as they once were, and the “hanky code,” which was on its way out by the 1980s has now been rendered entirely irrelevant by dating apps, which allow for endless private conversations among strangers.

I doubt any of the embroidered handkerchiefs or bandanas in “Stitches” would have been used by our hanky-loving ancestors. The sentiments they convey are too bold, too overt, too contemporary. But if those ancestors could travel through time and see this show, some of them would surely appreciate it. If they hadn’t always had to speak in coded language and coy innuendoes, maybe they would have made statements just like these.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.