Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave

Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave documents an exhibition of the same title organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art and visual artist Anne Wilson to investigate the global crisis of production and skill-based textile labor. Essays by Glenn Adamson, Jenni Sorkin, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Philis Alvic, and Laura Y. Liu address a history of craft and textile production, while considering how Wilson uses craft and collaborative process as potent political metaphors in art.

Published by the Knoxville Museum of Art in collaboration with WhiteWalls and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu

Local Industry

Archive of Production

Knoxville Museum of Art

The "Local Industry Cloth" was formed entirely from donated fibers, often from mills facing closure throughout the southeastern United States. The thread was prepared on hand-crank bobbin winders by any visitor to the KMA. Wound bobbins were then used by experienced weavers to compose this single bolt of cloth, made up of only stripes, on one loom setup inside the gallery space. After making, the cloth was donated to the Knoxville Museum of Art by the artist alongside an “Archive of Production” identifying all contributors to Local Industry.

Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave documents an exhibition of the same title organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art and visual artist Anne Wilson to investigate the global crisis of production and skill-based textile labor. Essays by Glenn Adamson, Jenni Sorkin, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Philis Alvic, and Laura Y. Liu address a history of craft and textile production, while considering how Wilson uses craft and collaborative process as potent political metaphors in art.

Published by the Knoxville Museum of Art in collaboration with WhiteWalls and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu

"Creative Entanglement: A Documentary of Anne Wilson's Local Industry"

Video produced by Ren Cummings

Anne Wilson

Local Industry, February - April 2010

Collaborative performance/textile production

Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee

Knoxville, Tennessee, is located in the historical heartland of both hand weaving traditions and industrial textile manufacturing in the southeastern United States. Conceived specifically for the Knoxville Museum of Art, Local Industry invited all museum visitors to consider textile production by spending time participating in the making of a woven cloth. Inside the museum factory, rows of hand bobbin winders recalled the group dynamics of a mill. Using fiber donated from U.S. textile companies, winding was open to all groups and individuals. Seventy-nine experienced weavers throughout the southeastern U.S. used the wound bobbins to collectively weave a single bolt of cloth on one loom inside the factory. Proceeding in sequence in a way related to exquisite corpse drawing, different weavers worked in 1 -2 day sessions over 3 months. The resulting cloth measures 24 inches wide x 75 feet 9 inches long and is now part of the permanent collection of the Knoxville Museum of Art. Over 2100 individuals comprise the Archive of Production which will always accompany the display of the cloth.

http://www.annewilsonartist.com/local-industry-credits.html

Anne Wilson, Wind-Up: Walking the Warp, 2008

A video documentation by Jeroen Nelemans (7:09 min)

A collaborative performance at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, January 2008. Participants included Sara Rabinowitz, Carla Duarte, Annie Egleson, Surabhi Ghosh, Jongock Kim, Rosemary Lee, Christy Matson, Rachel Moore, Jeroen Nelemans, Rana Siegel, and Anne Wilson.

Copyright 2008 Jeroen Nelemans

Anne Wilson

Rewinds, 2010

Glass

6 x 90 x 136 inches overall

Wilson was first introduced to the glass medium as an Artist in Residence at the Pilchuck Glass School. In watching the movement of the gaffers, she realized the relatedness of textile processes to glass -- glass is flexible and can be fibrous when molten to bend, spin, wind, and wrap. By translating fiber bobbin-winding and rewinding into glass, Wilson was able to exploit aesthetic analogies between these two materials and modes of production.

The sculpture, Rewinds, is comprised of a large horizontal glass platform, an architecturally aligned carpet-like space, filled with an array of glass weaving bobbins. Organized in a relationship to the working processes of sorting sizes and colors in piles and rows, these objects imply a transitional state of use-function. The sculpture implies a workspace, a topography of use.

From a larger social perspective, the rewind project addresses issues that exist within highly technological societies (a renewed enthusiasm for hand crafting and tactility in response to digital screen culture) and most of the world where objects such as these rewinds represent conditions of labor, economic survival, and a very non-romantic presence of the endlessly busy hand. In fundamentally clashing social, economic, and cultural contexts -- from the Tibetan refugee weaving studios in northern India, to European couture workshops, to the weaving studios in western art schools -- fiber rewinds exist as objects of similar function and practical resourcefulness. They are how textile workers save small lengths of fiber for later re-use. In Wilson's sculpture, the medium of glass fixes the process in time and elicits meditation on highly disparate cultural contexts about art, cloth, and cultural production.

http://www.windrewindweave.com

Weavers contributing to the collective cloth woven during the Local Industry project (part of the Knoxville Museum of Art exhibition Anne Wilson: Wind, Rewind, Weave) during the months of January to April 2010) were invited to contribute their thoughts and histories on weaving. Weavers were asked how and why did you begin weaving and why do you continue to weave today? Weaver’s responses are organized alphabetically by first name. Dialogue was initiated and compiled by Libby O’Bryan.

Glenn Adamson

"The End of the Line: Art at the Margins of Industry"

Sarah Jane Hardrath Kramer Lecture

Knoxville Museum of Art

April 6, 2010

Glenn Adamson is Deputy Head of Research and Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he leads a graduate program in the History of Design. His research interests include modern craft and design; furniture and ceramics in England and America in the 17th and 18th centuries; and decorative arts theory. Dr. Adamson is co-editor of the triannual Journal of Modern Craft, and the author of Thinking Through Craft (Berg Publishers/V and A Publications) and The Craft Reader (Berg, 2010).

A provocative writer, Adamson has helped shape the conversation around contemporary craft and has helped shift its position within the larger context of critical art making. He is a featured contributor to the exhibition catalog “Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave” alongside authors Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jennifer Sorkin, and Philis Alvic.

Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave is an exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art, installed by Wilson to investigate the crisis of production and skill based textile labor. Included is Rewinds, a new work created entirely in glass; video documentation of Wind-Up: Walking the Warp, a 2008 performance in Chicago; and a large site-specific project, Local Industry, that takes the form of an active weaving/winding factory set up in the museum space. Run over the course of several months, this project will involve the Knoxville community in the collaborative production of a unique bolt of cloth.

http://www.windrewindweave.com

Christy Matson

Millsounds, 2009

One minute of audio recorded in an industrial mill, time-stretched to one hour.

This project was made possible by a 2009 Artist Residency at The Oriole Mill, Hendersonville, NC.

Additional thanks to Stephan Michaelson and Michael Vallera.

Included in the exhibition Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave at the Knoxville Museum of Art.

Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave is an exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art, installed by Wilson to investigate the crisis of production and skill based textile labor. Included is Rewinds, a new work created entirely in glass; video documentation of Wind-Up: Walking the Warp, a 2008 performance in Chicago; and a large site-specific project, Local Industry, that takes the form of an active weaving/winding factory set up in the museum space. Run over the course of several months, this project will involve the Knoxville community in the collaborative production of a unique bolt of cloth.

http://www.windrewindweave.com

Anne Wilson talks about the exhibition Wind/Rewind/Weave at the Knoxville Museum of Art

Visual artist Anne Wilson has been at the forefront of artwork connecting conceptualism and handiwork, activism and aesthetics, investigating new possibilities for what has been called "relational aesthetics."

Wilson's practice extends the relational in terms of labor, collaboration, and identity construction, blending pedagogy with aesthetic production. Her work has been exhibited extensively including exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and as part of the 2002 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave is an exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art, installed by Wilson to investigate the crisis of production and skill based textile labor. Included is Rewinds, a new work created entirely in glass; video documentation of Wind-Up: Walking the Warp, a 2008 performance in Chicago; and a large site-specific project, Local Industry, that takes the form of an active weaving/winding factory set up in the museum space. Run over the course of several months, this project will involve the Knoxville community in the collaborative production of a unique bolt of cloth.

http://www.windrewindweave.com

Anne Wilson and studio interns research utilizing libraries, the Internet, studio practices, interviews, and conversations. Kimberly Pence is the research lead. This is an in-process compilation of information, never intended to be comprehensive.