SOFT

Contracommon is proud to present SOFT, a group exhibition of textile and fiber works selected from a national call for emerging artists. Participating artists include: Alissa Alfonso (Miami, FL), Steef Crombach (Austin, TX), Ely German (Austin, TX), Alie Jackson (Austin, TX), Holly Kuhl (Austin, TX), Madeline Marak (Shreveport, LA), Natalie Toth (New Orleans, LA), Tuk Vaughankraska (Bozeman, MT), April Wright (Germantown, TN), and Sixuan Zhu (Philadelphia, PA).

The artists included in SOFT employ the medium of fabric to a range of different effects, although some seem to arrive at similar preoccupations. Many of the works feature or bear striking resemblance to life—both human and non-human. Those not working directly with recognizable subjects have made works that abstractly reference the landscape or bodily forms. This subject matter, traces of life, is reflected in the use of repurposed and recycled materials.

The artists are reconstructing and repeating elements of the real world while giving new life to salvaged materials. Some have even elevated these recycled materials to the point of uncanny likeness to their living counterparts. Through varying degrees of gravity and absurdity, these works take familiar shapes at disorienting scales. Similarly disorienting perspectives and placement within the gallery allow for a playful experience, breathing room for the more serious themes explored in the exhibition.

Alissa Alfonso

Alissa Alfonso creates beautiful objects that repurpose the past in order to speak to the future. Her projects often seek to involve other artists and members of her community, reflecting an awareness of social ecosystems that echoes her love for nature. Her deep passion for environment and community is evident in everything she does, from botanical soft sculptures modeled after healing plants and made from upcycled, hand-dyed fabrics to her work developing Off the Canvas, an entirely green, non-traditional arts program Alfonso created and helps run for Broward County Schools. She transformed her 1973 Shasta Trailer “Squatter” into a pop-up mobile art gallery that showcases the work of other artists. Alfonso’s fused plastics installation works that hang from string and float across swimming pools silently note the link between plastic consumption and declining life in the world’s oceans. Alfonso is currently working on XL super stuffed wall collages as well as soft-sculpting parts for a new functional lighting collection.

“I am a contemporary textile artist who uses art to honor and recreate the natural world. I repurpose found materials to establish a message about the abundance and wasteful characteristics of modern life. My art celebrates the freedom inherent in nature, recognizes lost & disappearing landscapes, and warns of a future where nature can no longer heal itself. Nature’s Medicine is a series of soft sculptures and functional art lighting. Each piece is sewn, stuffed, hand-dyed fabric modeled after traditional medicinal plants for their healing properties. The functional art is created with repurposed metal forms and shades recovered in upcycled hand dyed textiles with hand sculpted sewn pieces assembled into plant and botanical lamps. Some of the healing plants replicated in this collection include Lavender and Pink Kush Marijuana. The fused plastic ‘clouds’ and ‘jellyfish’ that hang from wire or float across water in my installation works are both elegant and melancholy. The works are created with layered fused plastics that are melted, cut, sewn, and stuffed with plastic air pillows. The installations represent the silent beauty of clouds and sea animals as a connection between the overuse of plastics and declining life in the world’s oceans. My wall textile landscapes are created from hand dyed recycled, cut, designed, sewn and stuffed fabric. The play on depth in these pieces is inspired by sculptural relief art and Earth’s vast beautiful skies.  This work is memory-keeping for me. I want to capture a thing that matters in the moment and create beautiful objects that repurpose the past in order to speak to the future."

Steef Crombach

Steef Crombach (b. 1992) was born in Maastricht in the South of the Netherlands. Crombach earned her B.F.A from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague in 2014. Her work Piet was nominated by the Dutch King Willem-Alexander for the Royal Painters Prize, she curated and designed the massive floating exhibition; 'Dirty Daisies', during Art The Hague and she was the recipient of the renowned 'Contribution young talent' grant from the Mondriaan Fund in the Netherlands. With the help of these funds, she was able to research and invest in the Austin art scene which led her to organize and curate the nine-artist exhibition 'Expedition Batikback' at Co-Lab Projects. Since that time she has been visiting the United States for extended periods of time to curate, teach, exhibit, and research. In March 2018 Crombach officially relocated to Austin, she was the first recipient of Big Medium's Line Residency and continues to show her collection of ‘manifestations with cultural and local significance’ on International platforms, often in the form of soft sculpture and wax-resist dyeing.

“Although my work radiates a resolute materiality in a firm shape, my approach to the world is poetic and speculative. I question the status of objects and situations. In my work I deal with concrete manifestations by adding an almost identical second layer to them. In this way I attempt to unscrew the anchor points in our perception. The constant attempt to grasp my environment, and the time in which I live, forms the basis of my research. I collect patterns, objects, colloquialisms, and cultural beacons, and I try to save them in my own, and others’ memory, by copying, morphing, and merging them in my work. By showing my collection of ‘manifestations with cultural and local significance’, often in the form of patterns, I feel like I could enable people to see what invisibly shapes their direct environment and the way they are steered and positioned within it. With this, I hope to offer a more relative perspective upon our present time, and the aspects that might be part of our collective memory when we look back. Recently my work has become much more personal. Realizing that my view on my environment as an expat differs greatly from natives around me. Whatever seems culturally and locally significant to me might be a result of my outsider view? It is a confusing and unearthing feeling that has manifested itself slowly into my work.”

Ely German

Born in Buenos Aires in 2000, Ely German is currently studying Art at UT Austin and exploring how she can use her art to generate thought and conversation. She creates murals, tapestries, animations, paintings, illustrations and installations. Her work sprouts from reflection about our society, politics and environment as it relates to her own identity. The visual language German uses is surreal in nature, contains design and uses bold colors to create witty and often ironic critiques of modern society. “I use vivid colors and a disarming illustrational style to create tapestries with symbolic narratives that reference my relationships and personal history. Humor and human experience are part of the tools I employ alongside creating in a soft medium to be inviting and approachable for the audience.”

“Purple Dude embodies the experience of masking sad emotions. At first glance the image of Purple Dude is witty and even humorous, but once considered beyond its facial expression, it transforms. If viewed without the simple smiling face, the body language of the character is sorrowful. Throughout my work I build a visual language composed of symbolism and sentiment attached to shapes, color, and organization. When I depict four blue hands in my work I reference my family—mother, father, sister, and myself. Hands is a family portrait, and the same blue hands appear in Border Line. In Border Line, I imagine my parents as the two hands emerging from the top edge of the piece, my sister and I on the bottom edge. Within the piece lies the narrative of a specific moment in my life, directly created by our symbolic presence. When I was 14 years old my family and I relocated to the US permanently, this work embodies the visual description of my sentiments towards this period in my life. The red clouds connected by ladders in the outer edges object to the idealized idea of ascension to this country. To come to the US is considered a moment of advancement in most immigrants' lives, however this experience is also full of danger and pain. The pink airplanes cutting the piece horizontally echoes the effect airplanes had in this moment of my life. Airplanes became an image that is a placeholder for shift and turmoil. The purple figures symbolize the progression of my ability to communicate in English over time, starting with the deep purple forms that drag after the airplane, to mid tone figures facing away from each other, and ending in light purple figures that come together like pieces of one puzzle.”

Alie Jackson

Alie Jackson is a Multimedia Artist from Austin, TX, currently living and working at her home studio in Bastrop, TX. Jackson is also an award winning Animation Director, Art Director, Snapchat Official Lens Creator, and Sr. Instructor of Adobe Illustrator and Augmented Reality at the Austin School of Film.

“My work examines how the digital world and social media shapes the perception and behavior of ourselves, others, and objects around us. I tell these stories through various physical and digital mediums like textiles, augmented reality, and painting. I work from the subconscious in an abstract flow that brings to light observations of social commentary and internalized feelings and emotions with my personality's inner-workings. My work becomes a commentary on how our actions on and offline may affect our surroundings and how those surroundings affect our internalized feelings and emotions in an abstract and sometimes more overt manner.”

Holly Kuhl

Holly Kuhl lives and works in Austin, Texas. She graduated with honors from The University of Texas at Austin with a BFA in Studio Art in Fall 2020. Her work was included in the 2020 group exhibition From Afar at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, receiving Juror’s Distinction. She has shown works as part of a private collection in WEST. “As a way of seeking what constitutes the divide between decoration and function, my paintings layer fictitious patterns over the real or premade. Found material provides a visual noise, in constant optical confrontation to the shapes and bodies placed overtop. Subjects often in recumbent pose, afford brief stability and comfort, as tensions build across what is worn, what is constructed as space, and where colors operate in relation to the domestic trends of functional textiles, or as formal devices in traditional art-making.”

“My aim is to find pleasure in material, in physical possibilities and in limitations. I think a lot about the relationship of craft and [versus] fine art. How does pressed silk communicate sex and labor, when sat beside a roughed denim? Is a recycled tablecloth of polyester and plasticky linen grand enough to carry my treasured pigments and oil paint? Where do associations of gender and value breed themselves into a pattern’s history? To honor the material, is to utilize it, and I do so maternally; if a portrait or art-object is inherently precious, then my work seeks to include and thus elevate a scrap of fabric. I search for designs that will relate to the subject, but that is not to say I attempt complete seamlessness or balance. Refined areas neighbor those that break from the rule. Colors do not always match and patterns do not always repeat. I like playing tricks with structure, believability, and familiarity in ways that require the viewer to question what is present and what is important. The work satisfies a need to make, find, and concentrate.”

Madeline Marak

Madeline Marak is from Shreveport, Louisiana. She received her MFA from the Sam Fox School of Art and Design at Washington University in 2016 and her BFA from Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2013. She has exhibited at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Meadows Museum of Art in Shreveport, LA, Des Lee Gallery in St. Louis, UNO Gallery in New Orleans, Carol Gallery in New Orleans, and more. She has been an artist in residence at Mildred Lane in Beach Lake, PA, Forest Park Forever Artist Residence in St. Louis, MO, Casa Na Ilha Art Residence in Ilhabela, Brazil, Burren College of Art Residency + Programme in Co. Claire, Ireland, and Shreveport Regional Arts Council Summer Artist Residency. She has recently taken the position as Executive Director of the North Louisiana Arts Council in Ruston, Louisiana where she is currently living and creating work.

“Taking from my immediate surroundings, I create representations of the land spaces I inhabit. I explore the space where humans and nature interact, where the built environment and natural collide to create a negotiated interspace of the urban environment. Through painting, photography, textiles, and drawing I explore the dynamics of the natural world both indoors and out. I am motivated by my own human-nature and the impulse to represent, re-create, capture, and cultivate natural things. My fiber works explore the tactility of natural things butt up against a construction of what is natural. By creating my own species of fabricated plants, I explore a yearning for the physicality and experience of the outer doors while moving closer to identifying my personal relationship to the outside spaces I encounter.”

Natalie Toth

Natalie Toth is a New Orleans-based multimedia artist. She received a dual BA in Studio Art and Philosophy from Tulane University in 2019. She works predominantly with found objects and repurposed materials, challenging the arbitrary nature of value assignment in contemporary fine art. Her work has been shown throughout the United States and France.

“The central force guiding my practice is my enduring obsession with wealth and consumption; our ability and willingness to amass useless, costly items fascinates me, as does our indifference to ownership of/allegiance to material goods. Rampant consumerism has instilled a belief that whatever can be bought, should, and when we are no longer charmed or excited by an item, we can/should promptly discard and replace it with a superior alternative. I started thinking about this endemic wastefulness when I started acknowledging furniture dragged out to the curb.”

“What bothers me is that this banishment to the street signals the natural end of an object’s life: each couch or lamp that isn’t claimed by a passerby becomes landfill, regardless of its still-functional condition. To mitigate this, I stockpile refuse - plastic packaging from the mail, one-off socks, broken phone chargers, etc. and use them as raw material for my work. Doing so, at once minimizes the non-recyclable waste that I generate and creates strict parameters within which I can make art. The workable limits of my artworks are self-determining: I may only use what I have collected and all materials must be used in their entirety, thus reappropriating what was once trash into something else entirely. My art objects are largely abstract and crudely automatic, highlighting the breadth of material, and focusing on the transformational nature of the practice. If an object includes representational elements, the imagery and content often allude to the original uses of the items composing it, in a light-hearted, graphic nature. Thus, the material and subject matter are inherently analogous, making it so that the viewer may identify and relate to what they are seeing. My overarching intention is to invoke a reconsideration of one’s relationship with value; I seek to implore a reinterpretation of what we consider useless, disposable, or ephemeral.”

April Wright

April Wright is a visual artist from Germantown, Tennessee. She uses humble, everyday materials to connect personal narratives about home, relationships, memory, and identity.  She received her B.A. in Sculpture and Ceramics from Union University and her M.F.A. in Art Studio at the University of Kentucky with a focus in Ceramics and Fibers in 2020. She  works interdisciplinary in sculpture and installation art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in museums and galleries, such as the Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan, Alabama and Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Woman Made Gallery Chicago, Illinois, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, and Boom 48hr Student Neukolln Artist Festival, Berlin, Germany. While earning her MFA in Studio Arts she has taught both 3D and 2D foundational courses at the University of Kentucky as an Instructor of Record, and during her summers she reached out to her community in Lexington, teaching classes K-12 at the Living Arts and Science Center and Kentucky Mudworks. She has been an artist in resident at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art Columbia, South Carolina in 2020 and Mendocino Art Center in Mendocino, California.

“I use humble everyday materials to simulate fragile moments that live in between abandonment and renewal, connecting emotional and physical landscapes of home. Inspiration is drawn from the mundane tasks of everyday life, memories, fragile narratives, and complex emotional support systems that inhabit the home. In my process there remains ever present, a cyclical act of accumulating, repurposing, and building. My installations and sculptures are precarious and redolent with gestures of longing for stability within the home.”

“Gaston Bachelard stated that ‘homes are in us as much as we are in them.’ My concept of home represents an ambivalence, as a space that can be supportive and nurturing, and at the same time oppressive and disorienting. In my work, I express complex relationships in a space where melancholy is materialized. For instance, hollow paper cinder blocks stand in for emotional boundaries, while disjointed paper casted window frames collapse into diverse perspectives. Using repurposed, discarded materials to create metaphors for emotional support structures, the work expresses this ambivalent urgency to bury the past, while existing in the present with resilient adaptability. The materials that I primarily use are clay, paper, and fiber because they are easily accessible and are a part of everyday life. I also appreciate how elemental and easily overlooked they become as an everyday material. In these works that are redolent with ambiguity, tattered, disjointed paper windows sag off the wall, while dusty colorful fibers entangle voids for these sculptures. Some discarded materials used are shredded clothing from the inside of a punching bag, and reclaimed clay shavings. The physical properties of my materials which were once delicate and flexible are now stiff and dried. Essentially, we touch clay every day; from the ceramic plates off of which we eat, to the coffee cup we hold as we read, to the porcelain sinks and toilets that we use daily. I am interested in using clay in its broken-down stages to highlight the elemental tactility of the material as traces and remnants of human lived experiences. Building from humble materials and abstracting them into metaphors of specific human experiences compels me to continuously search for redemptive moments in these fragile narratives.”

Sixuan Zhu

Sixuan Zhu is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in glass. Interested in the discursive narratives of female experience in the global capitalist dynamics, Zhu creates objects that investigate pride, perseveres, and gender androgyny. She received her BFA from the Ohio State University, and her works have been shown in many places, including Philadelphia, PA, and Brooklyn, NY. Currently, she lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, in pursuing her MFA in Tyler School of Art at Temple University.

“Fascinated by the crackly fragility of the pink packing peanuts, I am drawn into the metaphorical narratives behind their protective nature: interlocking under pressure, yet unique when standing alone. Similarly, glass is resilient when it is hot, delicate when it is cold. The pink represents the queering of the materiality, with a sexual innuendo hinting the gender androgyny. As a millennial growing up in the rapidly developing China, I saw girls in holographic suits, pinkish lights from massage parlors, ecstasy candies, sex toy vending machines. These experiences unconsciously assimilated into my thinking and behavior as a woman. And when my sad cousin lectured me about family ethics, I thought about buying her a vibrator so that instead of being an object pinned up for public gazing, she can take control back of her family and careers by accepting and embracing her self-censored desire. Thus, my works are pink and quirky manifestos of breaking through the societal compression.one’s relationship with value; I seek to implore a reinterpretation of what we consider useless, disposable, or ephemeral.”