Stitched

Photography, with its many uses for personal snapshots, evidence, surveillance, advertising, storytelling, and art, is a relatively new medium. Textiles have traditionally been dismissed as craft in part because of the gendered norms embedded within these historically domestic practices, which include sewing, beading, embroidery, knitting, lacemaking, weaving, and dyeing. Although obvious distinctions exist, there are many threads of connection between the materials and processes used in the two mediums: the natural and synthetic fibres that compose paper and thread and the chemical process of creating a photograph or dyeing fabric.

The artists in this exhibition proudly collapse the divisions and hierarchies of these two mediums to reclaim and integrate methods of image-making into their critical practices, forming new approaches to lens-based and textile art forms. Including emerging and established artists, the artworks in this exhibition explore ritual, memory, aesthetic inheritance, technology, immigration, and colonial and embodied archives. In a cultural landscape that continues to become more and more digitized, their work asks what it means to create images that evoke the desire to touch and feel? By disrupting traditions that limit experimentation, the unexpected methods and hybridity of approaches chart new territories of what is possible in today’s overwhelmingly saturated image culture.

Public Programs

Opening Reception April 1, 7 - 9 PM

In-Person Exhibition Tour April 5, 1 - 1:45 PM

Artist Talk April 15, 6:30 - 7:30 PM

In this activation of Capture Photography Festival’s Featured Exhibition, Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices, three of the nine artists included in this exhibition - Maya Beaudry, Dana Claxton, and Michelle Sound - are in conversation with Capture Photography Festival’s Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator and Chelsea Yuill, Assistant Curator. This moderated discussion will touch upon the incorporation of textiles in lens-based works and the social and personal commentaries they provide.