« Rosanna Lefeuvre's The Sound of July evokes the view from a window framed by the work's rectilinear form. Light bounces off the window's invisible pane and translucent curtains, ricocheting through the fluid contours of a tree-filled patch of sky on a hot July day.
Stemming from several photographic sources, the resulting work is a hybrid object that also opens a view onto some of the shared concerns animating the artists in this exhibition: how might textiles provoke and facilitate productive displacements of images, textures, and forms? How might they spin new interdisciplinary connections between the artwork and the present world?
Lefeuvre is one of eight artists featured in July Fourth, so titled for the date of its opening. While not all the works displayed in the exhibition are textiles in a literal or traditional sense, they are united by their material and conceptual sensitivity to fiber, displaying different approaches to what we might call textile thinking. In this way, the artists in the exhibition reflect a shift initiated by European and American fiber artists of the 1960s and 70s whose innovations in thread and fabric propelled such materials into the sphere of contemporary art. Once freighted by debates over the distinction between fine art, design, and craft, textiles have benefitted from their art-world ubiquity in recent years, moving fluidly between such realms. This increasingly fertile situation has triggered a growing reexamination of the overlooked place of textiles in histories of the twentieth century, as well as a heightened awareness of their potential for artists of the twenty-first.
Foregrounding tactility, embodiment, and an openness to other media, the works in July Fourth exemplify this broader shift. The exhibition's artists seize on textile's propensity for medium promiscuousness—what T'ai Smith calls “the particular antidisciplinarity of textile thought”—deploying the pliable plane towards the making of works that unsettle clear distinctions between manual and mechanical processes.
For many, photography—long prized (and derided) for its mimetic qualities—serves as a productive point of origin in a chain of material transformations that renders their subjects increasingly abstract. In the resulting photo-tapestries, these artists emphasize the haptic materiality of the vertical plane. Others, meanwhile, highlight fiber's capacity to take up space. Whether deploying readymade objects, sculptural armatures, or expansively fibrous materials, these artists use textiles to evoke the rhythms and textures of everyday life.
As with photography, painting emerges as a dominant touchstone. The exhibition includes two works that might be categorized as paintings, but which emphasize the textile qualities of their supports (unstretched canvas, fibrous paper) as much as their painted imagery. In this light, we see them as painted-textiles. Several of the tapestries, on the other hand, evoke that medium's longstanding proximity to painting, referencing its historical aesthetics, or riffing on the painterly properties of thread.
Against the prevailing tendency to signal identity through more legible idioms of figuration, the artists included in July Fourth embrace abstraction to divergent ends. For all, textile thinking yields potent tools, providing the means for producing complex, often opaque, subject positions through abstracting strategies of displacement, and dislocation. »

Jenny Harris


A proposal and curation by the artists Abbey Muza and Maria Szakats, with contributions by Arda Asena, Hanna-Kaisa Korolainen, Daisy Lafarge, Rosanna Lefeuvre, Sophia Mairer, Silvana McNulty, Abbey Muza, Masha Silchenko and Maria Szakats.