Subversive, surreal, soapy, sociopolitical. Those words spring to mind upon viewing “Radiant Messenger: Drawings by China Marks” at Florida Institute of Technology’s Foosaner Art Museum.
The subversive part of the exhibition is evident immediately. While the word “drawings” is part of the exhibition’s title, some viewers will be surprised to see that all 57 of the artworks on display are made of machine-embroidered thread on fabric.
As I did, you might ask yourself why this show is installed at the Foosaner rather than Florida Tech’s Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts. Wouldn’t the latter have been a more logical venue?
Displayed alongside her works, a text panel bearing Marks’ artist’s statement does not explain why her artworks are called drawings. That the artist says they are, is enough for her.
“I draw with an industrial zigzag sewing machine and thread, starting with patterns and imagery I find on commercially available printed fabric to realize complex narratives,” she states.
Marks is an artist who refuses to be hemmed in by the old art-versus-craft dichotomy. By showing this work in a venue that has “art museum” in its name, Marks, in concert with the Foosaner’s administrative staff, are updating the position taken by the artists of the 1960s Studio Craft movement: Art is art, whether it is made with glass, clay, wood, thread or the traditional media of oil paint or bronze.
As the art-viewing public has done with that earlier assertion, today’s viewer is bound to agree that Marks’ drawings, despite their thread and fabric construction and painstaking attention to craft, have the spontaneity of a master’s pencil sketch. The stories the drawings tell are just as deftly drawn – pointed like daggers, in fact.
The medium in this case fits the message. Marks’ offbeat combos of clashing colors and patterns, bizarre sense of relative scale, and stagey compositions fit her absurdist narrative and dark sense of humor to a tee.
A work in the show titled “Barbara’s Boyfriend” combines surreal imagery with soap-opera theatrics. In a stage-like setting, three odd personages express themselves via speech bubbles over their heads.
As we enter the work, a woman whose head resembles a boiled potato is saying, “Perhaps as a pet, if you can be sure he’s housebroken, but not as a boyfriend!”
At center stage, a chrysanthemum-eyed Barbara sobs, “Why not? He’s affectionate, eager to please, and faithful, which is more than I can say about most of the men I’ve dated!”
The creature standing by our heroine’s side (a cock-eyed Clark Kent on four pegs) gallantly defends her.
“Your sister is a fine one to talk! Look at her baby!” he says, referring to the swaddled duckling in Potato Head’s arms.
Although the dialogue ends there, the story of the artist’s craft has only begun to beguile. Marks used bright yellow and green batik in contrasting patterns for the scene’s backdrop, while a stew of rusty red, brown and cream threads weave the carpet beneath the characters’ feet. The players themselves are a confection of commercially printed and embroidered fabrics and lace, topped with the artist’s own mix of free motion and computer-programmed machine-embroidery.
Marks’ career in art has shown that in whatever medium she works, process is central to her art.
Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Marks was educated at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she majored in sculpture and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Her Master of Fine Arts, also in sculpture, was awarded in 1976 by Washington University in St. Louis.
With degrees in hand, Marks departed the Midwest for New York and environs. During the first 24 years of her career she exhibited sculpture, drawings, prints and paintings in private galleries in New Jersey. The Morris Museum, Newark Museum and the Robeson Gallery at Rutgers University are three of the public institutions that gave her solo shows.
During this time she also amassed honors for her art, including five fellowships from the New Jersey Council for the Arts, two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Mid-Atlantic/NEA Regional Fellowship.
It was at the end of the year 2000, Marks says, when her drawings “told me they had to be sewn.”
That’s when she traded in her power tools and paint brushes for a portable home sewing machine, on which she taught herself to create the drawings on fabric with which she is now widely known.
When her portable machine was no longer up to the artist’s increasingly complex drawings, Marks (aided by a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant) purchased a computerized embroidery machine and a Windows-based laptop computer. The latter runs a design program that tells the machine – which Marks refers to as an extension of her nervous system – to embroider the texts she uses in her drawings.
Of her free-motion (artist-directed) stitching, Marks has written, “The industrial zig-zag sewing machine I draw with has only one stitch, a mechanized version of an artist’s scribble, which can lay in solid color or produce a thin line.”
As to the supports for her drawings, Marks’ neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., places her in proximity to fabric stores all over the city. She also buys second-hand clothing with interesting printed fabric that she can repurpose for her art.
Several of the drawings in the exhibition are created atop commercially woven tapestry copies of Old Master paintings. Marks has given her own surreal twist – and message – to the works. They include Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” of 1657-58 that Marks reinterpreted as “Dinner at Our House,” and “The Battle of Anghiari,” a 1603 copy by Peter Paul Rubens of a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Re-envisioned by Marks as “The Patchwork Pug Rides Again,” the speech bubble above one of the scene’s mounted warriors reads, “15 minutes till the parade starts, time to get high!”
All is not fun and games in these parodies, however. A tapestry of the “The Holy Trinity” by El Greco once depicted God the Father, surrounded by mourning angels, supporting his crucified Son’s lifeless body.
In her variation, “What’s Going On?”, Marks has transformed God and the angels into concerned, Dali-esque bystanders who react to the inert body of a semi-nude man with a brown face.
The speech bubbles in this picture say in part: “The second one in a week!” and “Another man of color D.O.A. who didn’t have a gun after all …”
If you find this or some other of the messages in “Radiant Messenger” to be brutally frank, shockingly audacious or just plain off the wall, it’s time to go back and reread part of Marks’ artist’s statement.
“I am after as complex a truth as possible. My drawings reflect the world in all its glory, horror and absurdity, its workers and slugs, sleepwalkers and prophets.”
Radiant Messenger: Drawings by China Marks is on view until Jan. 7, 2017. The Foosaner Art Museum is located at 1463 Highland Avenue, in Melbourne’s Eau Gallie Arts District.