SEPTINDECIM

Septindecim is Latin for a 17-year period, an interval that animates the cicada brood that accompanies us this season and names them – Magicicada septendecim. Their strategy is to generate underground and emerge in a swarm, in abundance, so many they can't all be caught – what we call “strategic flocking.” 

Flocking is also the name for a process of accumulation – fiber particles onto a surface, attached through adhesion or electric charge. The works exhibited are products of  intentional, careful accumulation – junk journals made from more than a quarter century of found objects covering childhood musings, young love, ancestral foods, and early classes at School of the Alternative; remnants from artistic processes arranged as murmurations, repurposed airplane blankets, traditional Chinese and Vietnamese knots woven as gestures of transformation, collectively assembled mythical creatures, and the results of myriad creative partnerships that deepen, bloom, and erupt over time. These are slow works of nourishment – mirroring the cicada’s slow brooding cycles.

A flocked surface is soft to the touch, like fur or wool, and the artist's in this collection are familiar with this nature. In repetition and in refracted forms, we see the softness of a bed, of a nest, of a cradle. The textile pieces here are fit for purpose, whether their function is to comfort, confront, or record.

The figures depicted here are in process, moving from state to state – solid becoming liquid, liquid becoming gas – phase changes as temperatures rise. We see chimerical creatures, grotesque and beloved, a jolt of recognition of the familiar in the strange. In their movement, the true nature of things is revealed.