1/2 FLEX 09/06/2024 - 09/08/2024

An exhibition of rag rugs in a bedroom featuring three artists who use looms to render patterns with scraps of worn, surplus, and discarded fabrics.

Francesca Martinazzi, Monte Altissimo. This is a poem woven on my two-harness floor loom using my grandmother's bedsheets, clothing, and tablecloth. It honors the mountains where I live and creates a bridge between an ancient checkerboard pattern engraved in stone near my home and the checkerboard tablecloth I wove into this composition.

Mae Colburn, Hypothetical Rugs. 36 Sketches made with fabric remnants from larger rag rugs I have woven: surplus shirting, worn bedsheets, scraps of silk, swimwear fabric, and wool skirts from my grandmother. These finite materials meet an infinite checkerboard pattern programmed into the warp on my four-harness floor loom.

Mariah Smith, 7 Rugs (?). Woven on a vertical loom with secondhand bedsheets and drawn on paper, this is an ongoing, iterative study of the basketweave parquet pattern. It is a generative process that embraces the tension between abstract rule-making and material constraints.

We hosted an opening party and facilitated an evening conversation about the prehistoric origins of Francesca's woven poem, Monte Altissimo. In addition to the bedroom installation, we invited visitors to bring their own work to be discussed and documented throughout the weekend.