Sew What: Jessie Dunahoo, Elana Herzog, Ben Venom

IMAGE: Elana Herzog, Scale Shifts; Vision Adjusts, installation view at Sharjah Museum of Art, United Arab Emirates, 2015-16, Persian carpets, shag carpet (American circa 1970), laminated MDF flooring, wood pallet, metal staples, and fabric. Courtesy of the artist.

March 16 - July 10, 2021

University of Kentucky Art Museum

This exhibition brings together three distinct artists who share a love of common materials and an urge to investigate their potential as component parts of larger objects and installations. Using fabric, clothing, rugs, and plastic bags that are stitched together by hand or machine, their completed works are displayed on the floor, walls, or suspended from the ceiling. They each make a unique contribution to the venerable history of assemblage, altering scavenged or purchased items to address conditions of comfort, identity, and perceived value.

Jessie Dunahoo was a Lexington artist who was born deaf and additionally lost his vision at a young age. That didn’t prevent him from making elaborate art and environments with found materials around his home. As an adult, he worked five days a week at Latitude Artist Community, a local studio facility that provides creative outlets for individuals with disabilities. His sewn-together works present shifting areas of color, texture, language, and transparency.

IMAGE: Jessie Dunahoo, Untitled, circa 2010-15, plastic bags, fabric samples, and thread. Courtesy of the Estate of Jessie Dunahoo and Institute 193.

New York-based Elana Herzog consistently makes and unmakes objects, ripping and cutting textiles and carpets and situating them in and against specific gallery and museum architecture. For the last two decades, she has reveled in creating immersive situations that obliterate distinctions between old and new, common and precious, in process and completed. She states, “Speed, labor, progress, obsolescence, loss, kitsch, camp, nostalgia, sentimentality, taste…there are too many clichés out there for what I and other women artists do.”

IMAGE: Ben Venom, War Machine, 2018, handmade quilt with recycled fabric. Courtesy of the artist.

San Francisco-based Ben Venom combines the processes and aesthetics of quilt making with the robust graphics of heavy metal and punk music, tattoo culture, and heraldry. His large wall hangings utilize fragments of t-shirts from bands like Iron Maiden, AC/DC, and Poison, along with swatches of denim and other fabrics. Together, these form a complicated code switching between gendered traditions and unique sub-cultures.