Punctures: Textiles in Digital and Material Time
Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center
617 Main Street
Buffalo, NY, 14203
September 20, 2019–February 7, 2020
Squeaky Wheel is pleased to announce Punctures: Textiles in Digital and Material Time. Drawing from the little-known but expansive history connecting media arts and textile production, the exhibition features artists invested in the material, critical and liberatory politics of their intersections.
From the Lumière brothers taking the intermittent motion of a sewing machine to create the cinematograph, to the punch cards of the Jacquard loom forming the basis of modern computation, and the role of sewing and gendered labor in jobs like editing and dyeing in film production, textile production remains an essential, but insufficiently unacknowledged formal and social influence on media arts. These underpinnings aim to not only explicate an alternate history, but are meant to find ways to speculate new futures for media practice.
Consisting of three exhibitions and public programs that weave into each other, audiences will engage with artworks exploring a wide range of practices including, trans fashion and domesticity; gendered and immigrant labor under global racial capitalism; Gelede women’s commemoration, protest and power as represented in textile work; speculative future-casting through Oglala Lakota knowledge systems, and more.
The exhibition features installations by Betty Yu, Cecilia Vicuña, Charlie Best, Eniola Dawodu, Kite, and Sabrina Gschwandtner, performances by Charlie Best, Jodi Lynn Maracle, and Kite, screenings of work by Jodie Mack, Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Wang Bing, and guest speakers such as Jasmina Tumbas and Jolene Rickard.