Weave. Unweave. Weave again. In her solo exhibition on display this month until the 26th at Grizzly Grizzly gallery, artist Margo Wolowiec shows her unusual creative process behind the loom. Switching back and forth between weaving and unweaving, her seemingly tedious approach could be a study in meditation, repetition or perhaps just good old masochism. But whatever the intention, Wolowiec demands a reciprocal effort from her audience, asking us to discover those truths that she painstakingly wove and unwove. You’ll remember that patience is a virtue. Wolowiec employed this truth though thread.
Many of Wolowiec’s weavings evoke strange images of the cyberweb: the constant fluctaution of Twitter feeds, Instagram posts and Facebook newsfeed updates, especially. Some of her weavings take up the physical space of the gallery, which makes them more interactive with the visitors walking around. One piece, titled “One Day of Status Updates,” changes the image you see depending on where you stand. You can look up close, where the word “Greeeed” undulates across the top of the woven canvas, but you’ll also see lingering black stitches all over that suggest physical movement—as if the spinning sphere of statuses has disturbed the atmosphere. Many of the statuses are illegible—and Wolowiec might be commenting on the futility of our constant streaming. Written, erased, and written again, these woven words are both fragmented thoughts and physical objects.
Other artworks showcase our obession with digital information. “Instances (pink shirt, yellow coffee),” for example, arranges blurry, disjointed images in registers. While some of these images are just barely discernible, others remain completely illegible but suggest indistinct physical objects. The artwork resembles the screen of a paused VHS in its flickering nature. It aligns our consumption of information with an incoherent stream of consciousness—tying together hazy memories with brief moments of clarity.
Needless to say, Wolowiec calls for the same disciplined physical and mental energy that she put into these works. There will be squinting, there will be pacing, and yes, there will be a lot of head scratching. But in this way, Wolowiec demands that we pay our dues. She forces us to afford those invisible thoughts and often too visible tweets the silent contemplation only a white-walled gallery on a Philly First Friday can provide.
“Catching Thread” Margo Wolowiec October 4 - 26, 2013 Grizzly Grizzly 319 N 11th Street, 2nd Floor Philadelphia PA
