Sources:
Northeastern University College of Arts, Media and Design
Fuller Craft Museum
Tracing Absence
Exhibition: October 1, 2020–January 31, 2021
We live in an age of information: economic and social relations are increasingly digital, dispersed, disembodied, and data-driven. If the internet once held out a democratic promise of access and full disclosure, today truth, meaning, and authenticity seem ever harder to get your hands on. Set within this context, artists Fafnir Adamites and Matthew Cummings investigate forms of information withholding in explicitly material terms.
Matthew Cummings takes documents released as part of the federal Freedom of Information Act (1967) and in high-profile leaks as a starting point to explore visibility and invisibility, contingency and comprehensiveness. Both the FOIA and leaks offer gestures of transparency. Yet these gestures are frustrated by what has been redacted or otherwise rendered illegible: blank white boxes masking “classified” material, the repeated marginalia of exemption codes, the loss of resolution over time as mechanical and digital reproduction (faxing, photocopying, scanning) degrades the clarity of the original. Cummings combines experimental printing and plaster pouring techniques to make page-sized wall sculptures that focus our attention on the material presence and patterns of absence.
Fafnir Adamites turns the focus inward. They explore embodied memory, how information is stored in – and suppressed by – the body, and how the effects of trauma and violence may be inherited across generations through subtle alterations in gene expression. Epigeneticists refer to gene expression through the language of legibility: how genetic information is “encoded,” “read,” “transcribed,” and “translated.” Made from black and white t-shirts, Adamites’ monochrome weavings conceal their original sources, becoming increasingly illegible as the structures accrue over time. In The Presence of Absence, Adamites lays weavings into wet hydrostone before ripping them up when it sets, leaving behind fabric fragments and elusive traces. Adamites offers these broken pieces as a form of countermonument for traumatic events: impossible to fully know, process, or resolve.
Explore the exhibition virtually below:
https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=5ywhg93LLVg
Makers and Mentors: The Art and Life of Snow Farm—The New England Craft School
Exhibition: November 28, 2020–July 4, 2021
This November, Fuller Craft Museum celebrates the numerous ways contemporary craft has been impacted through Snow Farm, the famed 50-acre craft school in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. This invitational exhibition highlights the work of multiple generations of artists who have been part of the school; makers who have been an enormous influence on those in the classroom, workshop, and studio – as well as those whose careers have been pivotally shaped by the institution. Along with the work of veteran, mid-career, and young artists, Makers, and Mentors will also highlight the historical development of the school, providing museum visitors with valuable insight into how Snow Farm has, and continues to be, a pioneering force in the realm of studio craft.