HARDCORE THREADLORE

Three game-changing contemporary artists are joining up for an explosive show, Hardcore Threadlore, at Johansson Projects, opening November 3, 2023. The artists, Terri Friedman, Dance Doyle, and Susie Taylor create contemporary art through woven structures, dyed fibers and sometimes a bold use of mixed media. Their work shares a language with abstract and figurative painting, and is composed of bright, iconic colors that evoke nostalgia, pulling you into the scenes that are woven.

With the intersection unification of warp and weft, Terri Friedman’s work attempts to weave new neural pathways on her loom and in her brain to combat a climate of anxiety and instability. Neuroplasticity and the brain’s ability to repair neural pathways have informed Friedman’s work, encouraging viewers to consider “What could go right?” instead of asking what will go wrong.

Dance Doyle is also a master weaver with a second foundation in sculpture, who uses the woven structure of tapestry to tell shaped, vibrant narratives of people in over-populated city environments. Using mixed media and dyed fiber, Dance’s work is packed with atmosphere, nostalgia, movement, and urban mysticism. 

Susie Taylor’s woven works explore color interaction and the perception of dimension & volume. Using high-contrast and multi-colored yarns, she is finding connections between weaving and pointillism where the interlacement of yarns creates discernible tones and textures that mix in the viewer’s eye. Susie works in the lineage of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College weavers that incorporate art, design, and craft sensibilities.

Hardcore Threadlore opens November 2 with an Artist Reception of Friday, November 3, from 5-8.

For all inquiries, contact Johansson Projects at 510-444-9140  or info@johanssonprojects.com

Dance Doyle is an Oakland-based artist with years of ceramic sculpture and hand-building experience. Doyle completed artist-in-residence programs at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY, the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE. They have served as vice president of Tapestry Weavers West, and are a member of the American Tapestry Alliance and the Textile Arts Council at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, CA. Their work has been shown at the Legion of Honor Museum, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, Minnesota Street Projects (San Francisco), Johansson Projects (Oakland) and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. In 2020, they were published in Textile Fibre Forum Magazine, the American Tapestry Alliance’s CODA Magazine, and featured twice in Fiber Art Now Magazine. In 2021, Doyle was published in Untitled Magazine’s Innovate issue and was a Chenven Foundation Grant recipient. In 2022, they were nominated for the Outstanding Student Award, granted by the Surface Design Association, and awarded the 2022 All-College Honors Scholarship from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. Doyle was awarded both the Jack K. & Gertrude Murphy and an Edwin Anthony & Adalaine Boudreaux Cadogan Award in 2022, and the Barclay Simpson Award in 2023. Doyle was an Open Studio Resident at Haystack in Maine and has started a year-long Graduate Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA. Currently, they are a Meantime Artist in Residence at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, CA.

Terri Friedman lives and works in El Cerrito, California. She is Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts where she has taught both undergraduate and graduate students for the past two decades. Born in Colorado, Friedman received her BA with Honors from Brown University and MFA from Claremont Graduate School. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; CODA Museum, Netherlands; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the San Jose Museum of Art; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California. Friedman has received numerous awards including The San Francisco 2021 Artadia Award, Facebook Artist in Residence, Cue Art Foundation Grant, Santa Barbara Arts Fund Grant, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Grant, Albin Polesak Award. In 2022 the De Young Museum acquired her seminal work ‘ENOUGH’ (2021).

Susie Taylor weaves abstract and dimensional textiles. She has exhibited her work in the U.S. and in international fiber art and contemporary textile biennials in China and Ukraine. Solo and group exhibitions include Origin Stories at Johansson Projects (Oakland); Altered Perceptions, at ICA San Jose, Poetic Geometry, at Textile Center Minneapolis; MATERIAL MEANING: A Living Legacy of Anni Albers at Craft in America Center (Los Angeles); and FIBER ART: 100 YEARS OF BAUHAUS at Art Ventures Gallery (Menlo Park, CA). Taylor is the recipient of a Handweavers Guild of America, Certificate of Excellence in Handweaving Level 1 and received an HGA Award for Beautiful Struggle at the National Fiber Direction 2015 at the Wichita Center for the Arts. She was awarded an HGA Award and the Innovation Award at Focus: Fiber 2014 at the Erie Art Museum. Other notable exhibitions include: Materials Hard and Soft, Greater Denton Arts Center, Fiber Arts VII, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Eastern Michigan University Gallery, and New Voices in Weaving, Contemporary Crafts Gallery (Portland). She is in the forthcoming exhibition “Weaving At Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students” at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, curated by Michael Beggs and Julie Thomson. Her work was recently acquired into the de Young Museum’s permanent collection (San Francisco) and has been published in The LA Times, American Craft, Fiberarts, FiberArt Now, The Textile Eye, Complex Weavers Journal, Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot, Handwoven, Journal of Weavers Spinners & Dyers and The Bulletin (Guild of Canadian Weavers) magazines.

Dance Doyle visually records urban narratives through woven, shaped, mixed-media tapestry created on large 4-harness floor looms. The visual translation of thought and memory, on and off the grid helps usher in a re-negotiation of their past and accords them with a sense of power they once thought had vanished. Self-taught through trial and error, they had no rules because they’d never been taught any; this absolutely allowed them the freedom to develop techniques and shape their work the way they imagined it, tempting the traditional forms of tapestry to follow infinite directions. They use the slit tapestry in order to achieve straight lines and create disjointedness throughout the landscape of the tapestry. Though they use mostly hand-dyed natural materials like wool, silk, cotton, and linen, they also use unconventional materials that are either found or re-purposed to enhance the narrative. Growing up in Oakland during the peak of the crack epidemic of the 1980’s and 90’s, Doyle was surrounded by the vibrance of camp/hip-hop fashion, urban decay covered by street art, abandoned apartment stores, pigeon and human shit, crime, busted car windows, the best music blasting everywhere, and a stunning foggy bay backdrop. Their translations into tapestry have all been informed by that beautiful, heavy environment.

Terri Friedman’s work responds to internal and external uncertainty through woven tapestries. Seeing the act of weaving as a unification of warp and weft – or left and right brain – Friedman attempts to weave new neural pathways on her loom and in her brain, combatting a climate of anxiety and instability with fiber. The human brain is wired for negativity and catastrophe, with our fight or flight responses being our first reaction to anxiety. Neuroplasticity and the brain’s ability to repair neural pathways has informed Friedman’s work, encouraging viewers to ask themselves ‘what could go right?’ instead of considering what will go wrong. Friedman’s process is meticulous: the artist draws each work and selects fibers before weaving. Her works undermine a traditional hierarchy of materials, incorporating objects like painted piping, hemp cords, and stained glass with naturally dyed wools and acrylic threads. The warp and weft of these threads carry equal importance, as the artist embeds stripes or plaid into each piece. By strategically placing fibers of varying thickness and texture, Friedman creates pieces that appear multi-layered and borrow from other artistic practices: black lines allude to the solder of stained glass while disparate patterns placed side by side recall quilting techniques. Her most recent work explores the relationship between mind and body, considering the effects brain chemistry has on creating elevated emotional states and utilizing color, fiber, language, and abstract gestures to activate chemicals like Serotonin, Endorphins, Dopamine, and Oxytocin. Cultivating these elevated states and happy hormones is a political and personal weapon for Friedman that serves as barrier against indulging in despair. Though not representational or figurative, the work is imbued with an organic quality: orifices, uvulas, eyes, intestine-like cords, veins, and hair are primary in the work. Holes and cracks within the work allow light to penetrate each piece. Language and color are employed in Friedman’s work to create somatic posters of urgency. Words like ‘heal’ ‘alive’ and ‘refresh’ can be found in these pieces, alongside a palate of acid yellows, dirty ochres, reds whites and blues, and hot pinks that envelop and camouflage their meaning, acting as a suggestion rather than a lecture. Friedman is drawn to abstraction because it “creates the most powerful picture of the unexplainable and unknowable.” It allows the artist to make sense of personal and world events, exploring places where the political and emotional bodies intersect. A response to anxiety, anger, and grief; each weaving is an agitated yet affirmative scream.

Susie Taylor pulls traditional ideas forward and vary the form but not the formula. Therefore, she might arrive at the same conclusion as another artist despite our different mediums, locations or life experiences. Our digital world offers a daily jumble of images that blur divisions and promote the fusion of ideas. Her work challenges visual perception by merging formal considerations with optical effects that interrupt and disguise ordered systems. Pulsating striped rhythms and high-contrast textural effects fade in and out of dizzying figure/ground relationships, while a playful use of pattern is rooted in nostalgia, memory and imagination. Taylor composes with stripes, blocks, and textures, in addition to color and linear gradients to articulate transition and visual dimension. She often includes meandering lines that guide the eye along a traceable path. She intuitively applies Gestalt principles that trick the eye by simplifying complex patterns by way of organizing related shapes. Many of her ideas are presented as a series where each piece is a factor in a longer record. Working this way allows her to present variations on a theme. Taylor’s work is conceived within the tradition of weaving, a binary system, which requires a creative and technical mindset to solve visual and structural puzzles. A precursor to computing, the perpendicular grid of warp and weft is the foundation of woven cloth that stores coded patterns and embedded imagery. The interplay of yarns produces discernible color tones and textures that support a deeper exploration of translucency, opacity, saturation, and color interaction. She is guided by an intuitive sense of geometry and mathematical practicality to explore structure-based, multi-layered constructions that rely on both loom-control and hand manipulation. Taylor draws inspiration from the Bauhaus model of integrating Art, Design, and Craft, and The Weaving Workshop where female students applied fundamental Bauhaus ideals that contributed elevating weaving into new modern space. These ideals continue to move through other institutions, including Black Mountain College, and from one generation to the next like an infinite, never ending thread. Weaving is rooted in function and skilled handwork, and grew into a Craft medium that fostered individual expression in opposition to industrialization. There is a certain charm found in the evidence of hand-made processes associated with the tradition of Craft. The versatility of her practice is that she is trained in the lineage of function and design but also relies on a foundation of Art History that informs a
broader exploration of visual ideas. She is inspired by Minimalist, Abstract and Impressionist painters that changed the way we see optical effects and color relationships. She connects many of these concepts back to weaving and my own study of geometric abstraction. The loom is a
mechanized extension of her mind while her hands make the connection between the mental and the physical. She has a growing interest in the relationship between Pointillism, digital pixels and the gridded interlacement of colored yarns. She strives to create work using the fusion of history and tradition shaped by a modern matrix.

A Festival of Fiber Art | December 6, 2023 by David M. Roth
“…it’s heartening to see another East Bay institution, Johansson Projects, mount an exhibition that reflects a similar ethos, seen in current (2022-23) works by Dance Doyle, Terri Friedman and Susie Taylor — artists whose approaches to weaving are as radical as they are unalike.”  LINK