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Hildur Bjarnadottir at Pulliam Deffenbaugh - Portland, Ore
Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Sue Taylor
Internationally admired for her excellent skills in weaving, needlework and crochet, Hildur Bjarnadottir invests traditional forms such as doilies and table coverings with humor and surprise. With this exhibition of new work, "Stretching Canvas," she placed herself in the company of artists like Ghada Amer, Lia Cook and Elaine Reichek, who interrogate the fraught relationship between textiles and painting. Even in our expanded, postmodern art world, painting still rules, or so Bjarnadottir laments in her witty and colorful Tchotchke. Here, she has embroidered a lush floral still life on canvas, in a process called velvet pile, and inscribed above the image, "Painting is the only real art form." Bjarnadottir, like many fiber artists, may have internalized the dictum while consciously opposing it. Yet the very marginalization of her craft-based mediums lends them an edgy vitality, an inherent resistance such that this charming flower piece can become a kind of provocation.
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In Fairy Puke, the densely embroidered image, a central greenish splat, parodies in a painstakingly repetitive technique the spontaneous gesture of Abstract Expressionism. But there is more here than heavy-handed irony: the title of this pseudo-painting invokes a lichen common in the artist's native Iceland, and we are given both a tongue-in-cheek comment on abstract art and a straightforward representation of nature. Bjarnadottir extends this play with the virtual and the literal in an untitled digital print, which, in the allover linearity of its composition, resembles one of Pollock's poured paintings. If the latter are often described as "skeins" of paint, here the lines indeed consist of unfurling threads, yarn, hair--but photographically reproduced; Bjarnadottir scanned an adhesive lint-remover sheet into a computer and enlarged the image to about 4 feet high.
But the ultimate simulacrum has to be Golden Mean (so titled because it exhibits the satisfying proportions of 1:1.6). Here, Bjarnadottir selected commercially produced Formica laminate, whose decorative pattern imitates linen weave, and mounted it on the wall as a ready-made monochrome "painting." The photomechanically reproduced image of warp and weft represents both the privileged canvas and common textile.
Finally, in Reconstructed Canvas Bjarnadottir exposes the intrinsic textilehood of painting's preferred support, unraveling the perimeter of an unstretched canvas and reconstituting its cotton threads into a crocheted border. The resemblance of this modified canvas to a dresser scarf, table runner or decorative wall hanging, and the literal, material fusion of high and low, art and craft, made Reconstructed Canvas the stunning highlight of Bjarnadottir's brilliantly subversive exercise.
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