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.
