GMA ARCHITECTS TO PRESENT PULLING THREADS
On view October 28th, 2023 through February 1, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 28th, 5-9 pm.
GMA Architects is pleased to announce Pulling Threads an exhibition by Abbie Miller, featuring a large-scale textile installation in their Portland office. The exhibition results from a ten-month residency with the firm, during which Miller learned technical machine smocking using a twelve-inch Read Pleater. The new body of work explores paradox and sculptural form by challenging and revisiting historical construction methods within the garment industry, in line with Miller's twenty-year practice. The artist uses over-the-top construction processes and bold colors to create a textile that embodies visceral design.
The textile, which is made of muslin and thread, features undulating waves and red stripes that shift in and out of legibility. The stripes fade to pink as they are manipulated into more compact spaces and joined by a vibrant yellow sinew. Threads hang in place as stops and starts to the stitches, amplifying an intense construction and deconstruction process. Miller explores new formal techniques by merging interpretations of the classic garment stripe, exploring how it can transform in scale and movement, through the articulation of a smocking machine. The active movement of the pattern depicted in the compositions is inspired by 19th-century day dress's detail and form, smock tops, and the beginnings of American sportswear.
The artist has combined innumerable rows of stitching and tightly packed patterns with open-flowing movement, creating a riot of discordant and laborious corrugation. The piece was improvised on-site and developed in response to the environment, with bright colors introduced by hand painting and screen printing the muslin before passing it through the pleater. The textile measures twelve feet tall and nearly reaches floor to ceiling in the center of the room. The relationship between the construction, form, and surrounding space is tight, achieving a new intimacy and intensity. This dense piece commands the viewer to look closely at the details and experience the work in its totality. The exhibition aims to create new identities beyond former social constraints, with smocking liberated from the linear to the sublime. Ms. Miller's nascent sartorial vocabulary has resulted in a construction that floats incomprehensible in space, suspended by the threads that form it.
The title "Pulling Threads" refers to delving deeper into history and the self. This exhibition explores the craft of smocking, which has historically served as laborers' attire and a decorative couture process. The show's title also relates to pulling smocking threads to compress and expand this object within the GMA workspace. ‘I am examining how a process can materialize into a visual form that can compress and suspend historical and contemporary expressions tailored to a particular location. What falls apart or becomes disillusioned, and what becomes clearer through the investigation process?’
Abbie Miller is an artist and designer who works between the fields of fashion and sculpture. She is based in Portland, OR, and was included in the 2020 China and USA Technology and Innovation in Fiber Art exhibit. Her works have been exhibited at the Academy of Arts and Letters, Portland Art Museum, The Missoula Museum of Art, Nicolaysen Art Museum, and Cranbrook Academy of Art, among others, and her works are in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum and the Scottsdale Museum of Art. She is a faculty member at the Applied Craft and Design MFA program through Pacific Northwest College of Art.