&Now 2019 Conference

Lisa Anne Auerbach, Francesca Capone & Jena Osman, "Text in Textiles"

A series of presentations and an inter-arts discussion that explores the articulations of textiles (what Jill Magi has named “a textile poetics”). The focus is on how woven forms code/change/translate language and what the stakes are when language is made material in textile form. The L.A. Times has described Lisa Anne Auerbach’s recent tapestries as “concrete poems that encourage visitors to leap from one title to another, improvising story lines that spread out in every direction”; she will discuss how a woven bookshelf can function as portraiture as well as her political textiles. Francesca Capone will present her procedural  “translations” of weavings into language; she has created a lexicon of equivalencies between the grammar of weaving and English grammar. Jena Osman will present a visual essay-poem experiment (a collaboration with artist Amze Emmons) that applies digital translation algorithms to everyday textile objects; the project aims to make visible of history of connections between ancient weaving technology and everyday digital tools. Topics touched on during the session may include steganography and coded clothing, quipus and linguistic knots, jacquard loom punch cards and digital coding...

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J'Lyn Chapman, "A Long Line and a Necessary Waist"

The experience of wearing clothing produces what artist and material culture researcher Ellen Sampson calls “inarticulable and embodied knowledge.” The convergence of bodies and garments produce friction, so that friction itself becomes the production of meaning imprinted on the garment, skin, and memory. This knowledge is ineffable in part because the friction of object-body-mind is itself so much a part of the habits of daily experience, what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “bodily schema,” that to isolate the constituent parts of the convergence is to make no-sense. And yet, the drive toward signification persists—how might one translate the phenomenology of clothing into language? How might one move beyond the language of history or cultural studies to express the intimate reciprocity of the body, the garment, and thought?

I propose a method that first traces the various acts of “translation” involved in the work of Etel Adnan, whose visual art and poetry suggests a convergence of the internal and external, a materiality of thought. These translations might be more appropriately considered transits, bridging Adnan’s poetry, her paintings, and her tapestries. Further, in early 2016, the fashion designer Tory Burch created a small “pre-fall” collection that, in Burch’s words, “found inspiration in [Adnan’s] beautiful sense of color and contrast as well as her travels and multicultural spirit.” I wish to examine how the process of translating between mediums might offer a language through which to perform, not simply name, the material conditions of the body.

Secondly, through practice-based research in which I translate text to visual art to textile to a worn garment, I seek to find how my own body performs another act of translation by modifying the garment through wear and how, in turn, the garment imprints itself on my body, how it creates unique sensations and grammatical arrangements.