Reckoning: Adornment as Narrative: Curated by Erika Diamond

Contemporary cultural icon RuPaul famously professed that “you’re born naked and the rest is drag.” Our identities are shaped as we come to terms with how the world portrays us, who we actually are, and how we want to be seen. We make daily choices to adorn ourselves in ways that reflect who we are and help us find community. 

This exhibition of diverse practices is anchored at three points: methods of reckoning; the function of adornment; and the fusing of personal and cultural narrative. It features acts of glitz, embellishment, and homage by Shae Bishop, David Harper Clemons, Kashif Dennis, Annie Evelyn, Margaret Jacobs, Julia Kwon, Katrina Majkut, Heather MacKenzie, and Luis Sahagun. Through material language, each artist tells the story of their identity. Inherent to these stories are contradictions—between labor and value, feminine and masculine, natural and fabricated.

Kashif Dennis and Luis Sahagun combine portraiture and collaged elements of adornment, working at the intersection of celebration, labor, spirituality, and healing. Dennis draws imagery from the cultural festival of Trinidad Carnival but further complicates this depiction through the inclusion of devices historically used for enslavement. In these images, the past intermingles with the future while shackles and chains are reclaimed as celebratory corporeal decoration. Bodies decorate bodies, and worlds are cradled within the crook of an arm.

Using a combination of construction materials and handmade embellishments, Sahagun underscores the value of the undocumented laborer in his work. He blends aesthetics from building construction methods, Mesoamerican indigenous iconography, curanderismo healing practices, and Renaissance portraiture. By representing himself in two of these portraits, Sahagun reckons with aspects of his own conflicting identities as both indigenous and colonizer. Pain is our North Star, with its conquistador collar and flag towering over us, offers a less glossy look at the complications and violence of colonialism.

David Harper Clemons and Margaret Jacobs blend the natural with the manufactured in their skillful metalcraft, referencing life cycles and tales of cultural and personal resilience. Jacobs uses formed and powder-coated steel to represent specific botanicals that intermingle cultural, personal, and familial narratives. She chooses plant forms that serve a medicinal, cultural, or nutritional use, highlighting the adaptability of the agricultural and curative practices of her Akwesasne Mohawk culture. Her use of steel honors the Mohawk high metal workers, who have walked the skies and built many iconic bridges and skyscrapers across the U.S. 

Much like Jacobs, David Harper Clemons pays careful attention to his surfaces and material choices. Silver mixes elegantly with bone and garnet in his series Memento Mori: Blood, Bone, and the Void. Together they tell the story of our collective reckoning with mortality. In works like Red Sails at Night, Clemons chronicles the search for safe harbor through the metaphor of a weather-worn boat struggling against the waves. 

Shae Bishop, Annie Evelyn, and Katrina Majkut challenge gender constructs related to sports, furniture, domestic arts, and the kitchen. Creating convincingly wearable textiles from clay tiles, Shae Bishop addresses themes of masculinity, globalization of everyday commercial goods, and portrayals of the American dream in his work. This style of apron harkens back to domestic patterns and gender roles of the 1950s, while the iconic red bandana holds a wide range of American symbolism from cowboys to queer boys, despite the paisley pattern’s roots in Asia.

Annie Evelyn often uses materials of adornment that signify value (ie: pearls, gold, and silk), but her approach is more playful, in a manner more akin to playing dress up. Her furniture doesn’t merely support our bodies. It amplifies our personalities and props us up like a tiny stage. It’s furniture in drag, functioning less as decor for the room and more like decoration for the body. Taking cues from her own childhood influences, the Audrey chair is an elegantly crafted homage to the classic style of fashion icon Audrey Hepburn.

Katrina Majkut capitalizes on the subversive act of combining embroidery and chit chat, affectionately known in textile circles as “stitch n’ bitch.” This title implies the potential for discourse around the politically polarizing topics on which she focuses for her designs. Often working in partnership with other artists or organizations, these embroidery designs are accessible to all who can wield a needle and thread and offer the participant a chance to put their own labor into the messages. Along with her glittery baseball cards, Majkut’s work creates tension between gendered notions of both craft and American pastimes.

Textile artists Julia Kwon and Heather MacKenzie use materials meant for gift-giving to craft intricate and meaningful patterns driven by data. Kwon illustrates current trends and patterns from the data of recent, often intersectional, socio-political events. These two works in particular, reference the increased threat of wildfires in the U.S. and the rise of mental health struggles among Americans during the COVID pandemic. While many of the artists in this exhibition use pretty materials to tackle difficult topics, Kwon does so with statistical precision. Thus, the message cuts like a knife despite the soft edges of her textiles.

Heather MacKenzie excels at manipulating weaving drafts, devising intentionally queer combinations of materials in their sculptural woven works. They reject the singular plane of most weaving, creating intricate works that unfold, spill over, or emerge from the confines of their backgrounds. The fuzzy mohair and holographic curling ribbon – an altogether unlikely choice for a weaver – add to the fluctuant quality of these works. With the largest of these representing encrypted queer coming out stories, they shift and change as we move, gleefully grabbing and tossing out light and color, almost as if they were breathing.

Through the vernacular of adornment, each artist’s work reveals its own method of coming to terms – with identity, with materiality, or with present day politics. The body sits at the heart of this conversation, a site for discourse around value, power, beauty, and truth. These works remind us that our bodies bear the adornment of our own choosing as well as the weight of our collective past. They allude to the personal and communal processes of healing, joining, and connecting. They help us to reckon with difficult histories and to imagine the dazzling possibilities of a future that celebrates multiple and complex identities. 

 Curatorial statement by Erika Diamond, Curator