A few years ago, the artist Alexandra Zuckerman bought herself a loom, following through on her long-held ambitions to weave. She was drawn to the loom’s strict arrangements of warp and weft, vertical and horizontal, that could expand her experiments with ready-made color, repetition, and the legacies of modernist abstraction. But as she honed her skills, textile after textile, Zuckerman came to the same conclusion.
"The colors lost luminosity. The finished textiles got nowhere close to that feeling of finding spools of dry color side-by-side in the thread store."
Instead, the artist found this feeling at weaving’s beginnings: in "color cards" or "yarn wraps." A weaver plans patterns with color tests, tightly binding different yarns around a small board in parallel stripes of different hues and widths.
In "Back and Forth," Zuckerman dramatically scales up this tradition of the weaver’s sketch: making mesmerizing stripe paintings without paint, and weaving lush textiles without the loom.
In a painstaking process, the artist unravels, cuts, re-winds, compresses, and knots together each string of yarn to compose spellbinding atmospheres of horizontal stripes. She uses around 1.5 kilometers of yarn per composition, and the final work of art is a spool of its own: progressing from top to bottom as a single, continuous thread. As with weaving, the work is wrapped sequentially – no returns possible – held taut with the help of a warping board.
Under Zuckerman’s careful laboring, the physical properties of the yarn are deferred for a moment, in order to foreground pure opticality. The vibrating color relationships perform the push and pull of an expressionist painting. Colors added for contrast later become essential for balance; a singular, improvisational gesture transforms into a compositional anchor.
But this abstraction is, above all else, felt. Grounded in images: memories of specific pieces of clothing. Fashion trends of the 1970s and 1980s. The sleekness of digital technologies, or the vibrating wobbliness of analog precursors. Reflections on water, the tranquility of the sea and the appearance of the horizon.
Pure optics give way to images, and images, in turn, to pure cotton. The luminosity is fuzzy, embracing, and sustaining. Or as the artist once put it:
"The image is revealed in a second from a distance, but when you get closer, something changes. The work should be like a living creature, it’s another image in a world full of images, but it’s open to a broader, deeper experience, it’s revealed slowly. And then it’s different from all the other images in the world."
To let images roll into your head, one into another. To become the conduit for a continuous thread of optic, somatic, and emotional material. To trust the work of a transfiguring abstraction that carries you away – and brings you back.
Levi Prombaum
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This exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of Artis.
Also check out other Arts events in Cluj-Napoca, Fine Arts events in Cluj-Napoca, Exhibitions in Cluj-Napoca.
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