Interwoven Sights and Spirits

‘Cloth as Canvas,’ at Solvang’s Elverhøj Museum, Showcases Creative Adventures in Textile Art

'Cloth as Canvas' gallery shot | Photo: Josef Woodard

Currently, Solvang’s Elverhøj Museum is hosting the exhibition Cloth as Canvas, for which a reasonably expanded subtitle might be “cloth as canvas, creative host, and artistic content itself.”

This fascinating show, featuring the work of 11 local textile-based artists involved in the Fibervision collaborative, illustrates the rich creative potential of sewn, woven, quilted, and otherwise reimagined ideas on fabric.

As an apt frontispiece to the show, we enter the gallery and are greeted with Debra Blake’s “Seeking Space,” with offset geometric forms and contrasting colors cohering into a cool, casual statement. Abstraction takes a different, semi-figurative turn on the facing wall, with Kristin Otte’s “Mylado.” This portrait of a woman’s face is transformed into a broader narrative with a mosaic-like speckling of natural scenery, vegetation, and images of antiquity imposed on the facial base.

“Mylado” by Kristen Ott | Photo: Courtesy
“Sliced Pears and Fig” by Maren Johnston | Photo: Courtesy

Other refreshingly creative twists on the fiber arts medium grace the museum walls and cause a reappraisal of what we might think of as textile art norms and conventional wisdoms. Patty Six’s “My Fabric Graffiti #2” layers three rows of visual buzz and data, almost suggesting vintage television cathode-ray tube distortion in the fabric. Birds are the thing in Lou Ann Smith’s “Avian Resonance 1,” a multicolored and multi-patchworked composite image of bird life.

Spacious and minimalist-clean, Maren Johnston’s “Sliced Pears” and “Fig” depict the still life–amenable stuff of fruit and vegetation as both subject and point of artistic departure, while Six’s “Joy” channels said spirit into (and from) a festive mix of sensuous shapes and text fragments.

“Joy” by Patty Six | Photo: Courtesy
“My Fabric Grafitti No. 2” by Patty Six | Photo: Courtesy

From a decidedly different perspective, a rustic/rusty truck is the heroic center of attention in Susan West’s series of silk-screened images of a funky, bulbous old truck. As she writes, “There is a beauty in this old rusty truck for me. Just imagine the stories it could tell.”

“The Girl Can’t Help It” by Diane Acevedo | Photo: Courtesy

Another iconic image — an archetypal depiction of a simple steep-roofed house — becomes a recurring, echoing vision in Diane Acevedo’s “The Girl Can’t Help It,” based on the book Parade of Flowers. In the work’s nine square panels, tucked neatly into a symmetrical grid in a variation on the quilt theme, the house motif is treated and adorned with a shifting array of color schemes and floral perimeters, with a sum effect of both heeding the decorative logic of classic quilt-making and shaking up the tradition.

Blurring such lines and assumed rules becomes a running theme in this enticing sampler exhibition. Clearly, craft is in the bones of the material and methodology here, but the creative impulses of original art-making also feed the process and seeks out new horizons of expression, in cloth and cloth-adjacent zones.

Cloth as Canvas is on view at Elverhøj Museum (1624 Elverhoy Wy., Solvang) through June 15. See elverhoj.org.