Soft Landing, Page Galleries, photos by Cheska Brown, 2022
Soft Landing
24 February 2022 — 19 March 2022
Page Galleries
Soft Landing is a group exhibition featuring work from artists Heidi Brickell, Vita Cochran, Finn Ferrier, Serene Hodgman, Fiona Jack, and Kathryn Tsui. The exhibition brings together a selection of artists who each engage with textiles on their own terms, incorporating material aspects into distinctly different modes of making. While their practices vary greatly, many of these artists share a similar engagement with narrative – real or imagined – and a preoccupation with re-addressing or re-presenting histories. Historically speaking, traditional textile arts have somewhat been maligned and dismissed as insubstantial. But it is arguably this exact history that makes textiles so engaging; their tactility and ostensibly quiet nature allowing for the deft navigation of complex ideas, providing a soft landing for sometimes heavily political concepts.
Fiona Jack is based in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. Jack has a Master of Fine Arts from the Californian Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and is Acting Head of Elam School of Fine Art at The University of Auckland. Her practice considers environmental and socio-political issues, with projects often involving aspects of participation, consultation and/or collaboration with individuals and communities. Everything / Nothing came out of a series of banal photos Jack took around her neighbourhood during lockdown, which she then digitally printed on a range of fabrics with machine embroidered text. The works speak to a wider body of work, including a recent project for The Lightship at Ports of Auckland, Tāmaki Makaurau. Entitled Everything (2022), this large-scale LED work responds to Jacks’ first major public artwork Nothing™ (1997) and reflects on global change in the 25 years between Nothing™ and Everything.
Text courtesy of → Page Galleries
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