Cut From the Same Cloth
Underground Gallery
29 July — 19 August 2017Art historian Rosalind Krauss once described the modernist grid, by its expanse and spread, as pertaining to the world beyond the artwork. “By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric.” It is of a piece that comes from a whole. It is of a structure that lends itself readily to multiples and derivatives, to repetitions and copies.
In Cut from the Same Cloth, Nicole Tee ruminates on notions of reproducibility that hint at an exploration of identity. Employing the structure of the grid, the artist re-produces textiles imbued with her family’s history. Swatches of cloth allude to an extant material source, as it purposefully recreates the layout of catalogs from flea markets. Grouped and labeled objectively (through pattern and color) and subjectively (by relation to the artist), familial narratives become superimposed upon the logic of a more formalist taxonomy.
In another work, patterns of the fabrics are copied and sewn on a grid, essentially replicating them. Similarly, a piece of fabric is recreated in different media. Implicit in this involvement with the creation of copies is the abrogation of the notion of artist-as-progenitor, as the original is located outside the purview of artistic practice. Paradoxically, the replicas become objects in themselves in lieu of the original. As with the grid which, while alluding to the outside world, also cements the work of art as an autonomous object; the replicas come to occupy a distinct position within an artistic context.
These objects, intimately tied to personal narratives, are at the same time unmoored from them. They are of the present. In replication, the objects are borne anew, take on different roles, allude to novel ideas, or emblematize other contexts. From the threads that bind us to familial relations, we create new swathes of subjective actualities. The grid ever becomes larger, moves beyond itself, in multiple, complex derivations.
— JC Rosette