WORK HOME WORK
[If you are interested in purchasing a work, please contact the gallery for more information]
Is work from home the same as work in the home? What is women’s work? And why do we work so damn much?
WORK HOME WORK is a conversation amongst three artists based in Brooklyn and the Bay Area about cloth as technology, making invisible labor visible, & working from - and at - home. The show collects large-scale installations made of hand-dyed and hand-woven paintings, quilted silk screens, hand- and machine-sewed blow up sculptures, and drawings in yarn using a hacked vintage knitting machine.
Photos by Michael T Workman
CORA LAUTZE
Mindful Home Workspace, 2021
Multi-piece installation
Ripstop, thread, inflatable blowers
Approx. 156 x 84 x 144 inches
(dimensions variable )
VICTORIA MANGANIELLO
Study of Plywood #5, 2016
Natural and Synthetic Fiber and Dye, Plywood
15.75 x 13 x 0.5 inches
VICTORIA MANGANIELLO + AMANDA MARTINEZ
Domestic Bargaining 3, 2020
Natural and Synthetic Fiber and Dye
40 x 31 inches
VICTORIA MANGANIELLO
Untitled #50, 2016
Natural and Synthetic Fiber and Dye 118 x 62 x 1 inches
CORA LAUTZE
"Blessed To Be Busy" Ripple #5, 2019
Silkscreen on Stonehenge with embossment
42 x 50 inches
Varied edition
VICTORIA MANGANIELLO
Untitled #60, 2017
Natural and Synthetic Fiber and Dye 82 x 60 x 1 inches
VICTORIA MANGANIELLO + AMANDA MARTINEZ
Domestic Bargaining 1, 2020
Natural and Synthetic Fiber and Dye
24 x 18 x 1 inches
CORA LAUTZE
Nobody Wants to Work Quilt, 2021
Silkscreen mesh and thread in artist frame
50 x 31 inches
CORA LAUTZE
Nobody Wants to Work, 2021
Silkscreen on Stonehenge with embossment
42 x 30 inches unframed
Varied edition of 13
VICTORIA MANGANIELLO + AMANDA MARTINEZ
Domestic Bargaining 2, 2020
Natural and Synthetic Fiber and Dye
68 x 27 inches
VICTORIA MANGANIELLO
Untitled #59, 2017
Natural and Synthetic Fiber and Dye
130 x 54 x 1 inches
VICTORIA MANGANIELLO
Study of Plywood #2, 2016
Natural and Synthetic Fiber and Dye, Plywood
9.75 x 5 x 0.5 inches
VICTORIA MANGANIELLO
Study of Plywood #3, 2016
Natural and Synthetic Fiber and Dye, Plywood
14.5 x 9 x 0.5 inches
Victoria Manganiello’s woven works are monumental and monumentally labor-intensive: she hand-spins her thread, makes her own dyes, and weaves massive, varied panels on a loom. They spread over walls and around corners and halve the space of the gallery. They stretch, revealing their hand-sewn seams, and one surrounds the viewer, revealing its backside and edges. Smaller works, tacked to shaped plywood, contrast soft and hard forms.
As an educator & organizer, Victoria often collaborates with students, participants, & other artists, including Amanda Martinez, whose sculptures and drawings often draw their repeated curves from natural forms. They found a 1980s Brother knitting machine, designed to knit patterns of Santa or hearts into sweaters or socks, & hacked it to recreate Amanda’s rippled drawings as knit wall works.
Cora Lautze’s large “ripple” is what you’re not supposed to see with a silkscreen print - so much ink and liquid that the paper itself starts to buckle and chafe, leaving a juicy trace of the artist’s labor & almost obscuring the embossed phrase below. Slogans about labor - nobody wants to work, blessed to be busy, any job is a good job - drawn from WPA posters to instagram hashtags, recur in several of Cora’s works. She spells them out in fonts she created inspired by WPA-era quilting patterns. Quilting the different weights of silk generate uniquely varied prints; the quilted screen and its print become mirror images of tool & product. But is any job a good job? Why do we work all the time? And why are we judged by our productivity? Her site-specific installation recreates an ideal “work from home” setup as touted by the mindfulness app Headspace, hilarious & futile, intermittently blowing up and falling limp, and then starting all over again.