Patrick Traer
January 1 – 6, 2006
Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 28 at 8:00 pm
“One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea and live
alone with one’s words.” Virginia Woolf.
“I just assembled about half of the 50 embroidered mural panels on the basement floor and this work is not about stars or constellations as I had thought. It is about being under water. And after having read four
Virginia Woolf novels this past summer, deep black water. Mapping perhaps the fizz and bubbling sweep of a last breath. The excessively fine taffeta threads waver unevenly along the edges of the stretchers and are pulled so very tightly at each staple point, the textile grid becomes skewed. The harder I pull to flatten the surface, the more irregular the tension and arrangement of threads. Even the most drum-tight surface picks up and drops reflected light, flaring forward and then dissolving to black with enough contrast to look rippled. Add to this the gently puckered interruptions of embroidery; matt thread pushed through and knotted in circular shapes ranging in size from tiny stipples to broad coins. I can live with their persistent, somewhat graceful imperfections. The matt black shapes sink more like stones, the taffeta shining around them, wet sand, softened and pulled silver smooth the way a receding wave would do.”
Patrick Traer, January 2006
