Various Small Fires is pleased to present Samantha Bittman: On Pattern, the New York-based artist’s first solo exhibition in Seoul. Following Shaping Color, an exhibition curated by Diedrick Brackens in our Los Angeles Gallery, this is Bittman’s second collaboration with VSF.
Over the last fifteen years, Samantha Bittman has developed an idiosyncratic weaving and painting practice inspired by the mathematical structures that undergird the natural, man-made, and digital worlds. Her dazzling hand-woven and painted textiles emerged from an early interest in representing the natural world and the mathematical patterns, like Fibonacci spirals, that dictate the array of forms we find there. Over time, Bittman’s work has evolved to emphasize this interest in pattern and simple mathematics, as required to structure weaving, as a subject in itself. The mathematical link that Bittman articulates between the natural world, woven structure, and the digital is rooted in patterns that illustrate growth, time, and additive processes; ultimately a complex read out of 1’s and 0’s render pattern that becomes the “picture” in her woven paintings. Weaving persists as a mode in Bittman’s practice because of its entanglements with the development of digital processes and because in its hand-made form, the cloth is always more complicated than the binary code that determines its pattern. When materialized through the maker working the loom, who leaves the residue, mistakes, and subjective choices of color and material in the final work, the textile reflects the analog and digital worlds simultaneously.
Bittman’s current work, which evokes both the optic intensity of Bridget Riley and the emphases on craft, color, and material of iconic fiber artist, Sheila Hicks, expands upon the typical categorization of weaving as a feminine craft. She highlights the way binary data was stored in punch cards to weave intricate patterning in early jacquard weaving, and how these influenced the development of early computing and coding, and by extension complicates and undermines persistent binaries in our understanding of creativities and innovations that are typically encoded with gendered biases.
When viewers enter the Seoul gallery they are met by a large wall of pattern. For the first time, Bittman is layering four of her material approaches into one work - a digitally generated and printed wallpaper (a rendition of Bertha Gray Hayes' Jitterbug pattern), an unstretched textile (referencing Op Art and with earlier origins in 19th century American coverlets and textiles of the Philippines), a stretched textile with vertical stripes, and an acrylic painting riffing on a Houndstooth pattern on the surface of the stretched fabric. The title of the exhibition is an homage to Anni Albers’ 1965 book, On Weaving, though in Bittman’s hands it would perhaps be more accurate to say pattern on pattern on pattern on pattern. Alongside this bombastic introduction, Bittman is also continuing to layer within the show with most works including both painted pattern on top of woven pattern and some also including stretched woven pattern installed on top of unstretched woven pattern.
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Samantha Bittman (b.1982, b. Chicago) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. She has participated in residency programs at the Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Ox-Bow School of Art. Her works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions including Ronchini, London, UK; Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL; Morgan Lehman, NY, NY; and Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, and group exhibitions including David Castillo, Miami, FL; Shane Campbell, Chicago, IL; and Rhona Hoffman, Chicago, IL. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Wall Street International, and The Washington Post, among others.