Photo courtesy of the Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts
There’s a museum just off of County Road T, east of Cedarburg, Wis., that is easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. I’d passed it from the main road half-a-dozen times without noticing it before eventually turning down a side road to make a U-turn one day. I’d heard of this place, but until I drew eyes on the converted barn inhabited by the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts, I hadn’t considered what I was missing.
My ignorance has no excuse given that I reside in the area, but others might be forgiven for missing it. For those who are so inclined, the museum’s current exhibition, “Water,” might be the perfect opportunity to break from one’s standard visual art routine to see a fascinating series of work about a most relevant Wisconsin subject.
Entering the barn-like gallery space, one sinks into a casual calmness; the kind usually stymied by the sanitized oppressiveness of white-walled institutions. The rustic, high-ceilinged and slightly darkened interior builds a tranquil ambience that welcomes reflection. A video by local artist Nirmal Raja is projected on draped fabric on the near north wall of the main gallery.
Thread in Open Waters superimposes hypnotic images of a hand stitching fabric and waves lapping repetitively on a beach. The natural cadence of the surf appears to interfere with the subject’s manual operation and frustrates viewer’s desire for resolution and closure. The soothing interplay of nature and culture here is a satisfying aperitif for the show.
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Heidi Parkes, a local notable quiltmaker and educator, offers some stunning examples of her work, though they are less direct in their association to water that others. Examples such as The Beach (Milwaukee) and The Beach (Chicago LSD) are obviously inspired by water, with each quilt manifesting a sense of places she’s resided on Lake Michigan, both through process and material transformation. Where Parkes evokes water impressionistically and psychologically, Karyl Sisson’s work could have come directly from the bottom of the ocean. Her accumulations of zippers and rivets from discarded clothes would be mistaken for living sea creatures if they weren’t on pedestals in a museum. Strange formations of undulating and zigzagging forms turn out to be recycled hardware from used clothing. Flight III, which looks like a scarlet-red octopus, is comprised of “deconstructed cotton zippers and thread.” Deconstructed might be too academic a term, as she’s not breaking the material down in any structural linguistic sense, but Sisson has thoroughly reimagined and formally transformed her chosen media.
The formal and material range of “Water” is admirable and demonstrates the chances curator Emily Schlemowitz has taken to tease possibilities out of a medium and a concept. Her choice to include Susan Falkman’s carved marble abstractions alongside Terese Agnew’s representational quilt, PROPOSED DEEP PIT MINE SITE, LYNNE TOWNSHIP, WISCONSIN, creates a fascinating and unlikely collision between material, art making and conservation.
The connections in the show are deep and wide but eventually surface. Falkman’s Statuario marble is, in fact, the ocean-born sediment of millions of years of accumulated life, while Agnew’s painstakingly involved quilting and embroidery represents the accumulated marks of a single existence, hoping desperately to prolong her own species’ timeline through effort and awareness. These are only a few of the stories I pulled from the depths. Countless more material connections, ecological lessons, personal yarns and competing timelines are still bobbing beneath the surface and just off the beaten path at the Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts though Nov. 17.
