Soft Play - at Collarworks
This past Saturday I was delighted to finally visit Collarworks up in Troy, NY (with my best friend in tow) to see the gorgeous show Soft Play. The singularity of each piece as well as the tapestry of installation woven between the four textile artists dares you to play with your understanding of softness.
When you walk into the ground level space, that also feels subterranean, the room is dotted with concentrated lights and pockets of shadow. The lighting is not soft but I think that might be on purpose. With my own personal propensity to look for chiaroscuro, the visual journey my eyes encountered at Soft Play was striking. Each nob of a thread or textile cast a shadow. Sometimes I found myself looking first at the piece, then its shadow, then the two as a whole.
Olivia Baldwin’s work especially highlighted how a work’s shadows can really manipulate the experience. When looking at Seem Allowance in the space the shadows transformed the softness of the medium, what emerged was strong and striking, a sharp figure. The piece became a silhouetted bust as I stepped back and away, the deep blues and greens seemed to melt into the darkness as the orange and pink slit of sunrise pushes through or forward.
Flying weirdo by Melissa Dadourian really punctuated the wall with shadows and color. The fabric mimicked the shadows of the wooden structure which seemed to scaffold the ideas out to us the viewer. Was the flying weirdo asking me to climb on but purposefully eluding where the real handholds might be. Even the fabric’s dye techniques played up the texture of the fabric - reminding me of the ridges and folds of dimensional cartography.
It was impossible to escape the orbit of Sidney Mullis’ "Purple Bush With Knuckle". The purple tentacles lended their weight and form to cascade shadow stamen atop a butterfly. What must the landing have been like for such a thin creature to land atop such a weighty filament. The stamens morphed into antennae as I familiarized myself with “Purple Bush With Knuckle”, and just as the shadows layered visually the questions regarding the relationship of the nature of the work.
As we rounded out the show it was Kelsey Tynik’s “Sisters” that requested some dialogue. Tyvik’s ability to soften wood was on show in all the pieces in Soft Play. The softness of the wood in “Sisters” was almost indiscernible from the fabric portions from a distance again asking the question whats the soft medium here, and maybe the soft medium here is our minds.
My pliable mind has certainly softened to the idea that softness is in the eye of the beholder.