Contributing Artists

Katie Vota

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

Borderlands, a solo exhibition by artist Katie Vota (MFA 2015), examines the tangibility and pliability of boundaries. Her large scale hand-woven wall hangings employ ‘fringe’ asa metaphor for the boundaries between our bodies, our identites, and the space we inhabit. Textiles have boarders, delineated edges (selveges), and fringes; often these fringes resulting from weaving of cloth are cut off or ignored. Vota, treasures and acknowledges these discarded edges and their potential for further exploration. Vota connects the notion of fringe as boundary to architecture by drawing inspiration from the design of Mashrabiyya, a wooden screen found in North African architecture, that controls and limit’s one’s gaze while allowing light to penetrate through. In examining the function of a boundary, the works in Borderlands control the way a viewer might move through the space, how they see and are seen. The large woven fringes, Transformation in Silvers of Wandering Fire, are both decorative and act as boundaries to passers-by outside the gallery, references histories of screens, fences, ideas around architectural flow, and traditions of decorative knotting. The work completely cordons off half the gallery except for the line of hanging threads and bundles at the bottom, hinting that one pulled thread could unravel the whole. Vota’s choice of rubber, as the material for her fringes and macrame, stems from its inherently elastic and impermanent materiality. It references histories of colonization, industry, and our current age of disposability. The cutting and undoing of the rubber, transforming it from trash into something useable feels akin to the laborious repetition of weaving textiles and notting in macrame. Borderlands visualizes boundaries that simulaneously divide and hint at their own undoing. Unlike the tendancy of architecture towards monumentalism, the presented boundaries are boarders are permeable and ever changing.