UTILE TIES at Francis Colburn Gallery

UVM (University of vERMONT)

ŽELJKA BLAKŠIĆ and LILY MOEBES

“Utile Ties” refers to the artists’ shared interest in the potential of the utilitarian in remaking social forms. Their work situates everyday objects and processes within an embodied idea of usefulness, particularly a gendered, working body. Throughout the show, utilitarian objects like cutlery, chains, string, and clothing are incorporated into the artwork with an immediacy that suggests a need to dismantle conventional forms as well as an optimism in their undoing.

Blakšić’s “Echo” paintings play with the idea of usefulness as well as the possibilities of materials in negative space. Translating the idea of camera-less filmmaking and photography onto the canvas objects are layered on the surface and applied with acrylic spray paint, creating a layered structure of outlines that can be suspended in many ways. Moebes’ paintings use gestural marks and utilitarian techniques to explore the body’s experience of synthesis through fragmentation. Pieces of canvas are sewn and woven together to make hybrid surfaces suggestive of uneasy embodiment. A similar sense of immediacy can be found in Moebes “Cathexes” sculptures, wood frames that are held together with wrapped strings, and Blakšić’s “Echo” paintings, works suggesting that there is something important just below the surface of everyday forms that needs to be reworked, rearranged, restructured. 

Blakšić’s “Stitch the Ruin” is an experimental film that reflects the conceptual, historical, and social concerns surrounding clothing production. In this film we see interconnected microscopic images of textiles gathered from Zagreb’s legendary flea market “Hrelić”, with lists of shut factories, many named after the partisan heroines of the Antifascist Women’s Front. By focusing closely on details like stitching and tags, this work explores knowledge of time and labor and reflects on the specific industrial structure of feeling established by workers in these socialist factories. 

IF WORK at anonymous GALLERY, 2023

anonymous presents If Work a group exhibition which brings together new and existing works by nine artists from the 2023–23 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program (IATP), on view from August 3–19, 2023. The exhibition is curated by Francesca Altamura and Miranda Samuels. A publication, organized by Kiyoto Koseki and Laura Genes, will feature contributions by the participating artists, as well as a curatorial statement written by Christine Bootes.

If Work brings into conversation artists, curators and writers who have spent the past year investigating the relationship between art and labor for the 2022-23 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program. Its title is drawn from IATP’s Distinguished Faculty Guest Julia Bryan-Wilson and her text Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, which traces the development of the ‘art worker’ in the 1970s as a collective political identity. What the category implies, she argues, is that the labor of art has shifted from a focus on the processes of artmaking and towards the broader socio-political matrices in which artists produce. The writings of philosopher Herbert Marcuse are identified as exercising particular influence on this transition, as he believed that revolution should synthesize work and art: “If work were accompanied by a reactivation of pre-genital polymorphous eroticism, then it would tend to become gratifying in itself without losing its work content.” That is, if work were combined with instinctual gratification—play—then it would be pleasurable without losing productivity, a bulwark against alienated labor.

Many artists in If Work return to objects themselves as implicit sites of both play and work by foregrounding themes of process, materiality, experimentation, and performance. Others marshal forms such as the comic book or public sculpture to surface counter-histories of collective, collaborative labor. Though they embrace a range of conceptual tactics and media, what all share is a concern for the interactions between artmaking and the social, intellectual, and political systems in which art operates. Indeed, the debates articulated by Bryan-Wilson in Art Workers are germane to our contemporary era. Though their contours have changed, the unionization drives; ascendence of liberation movements; critiques of capitalism; and proposals for radically alternative modes of living remain relevant to the current climate.

Participating Artists: Željka Blakšić AKA Gita Blak, Brett Ginsburg, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Annabelle Heckler, Li-Ming Hu,Chris Kojzar, Kiyoto Koseki, Naomi Lisiki, Lily Moebes, Kayla Weisdorf