Meg Lipke - "Pliable Channels"

Meg Lipke Pliable Channels
March 5th-April 3rd, 2016 @ Freight+Volume
Opening reception Saturday, March 5th from 7 to 10 PM

Freight+Volume is pleased to present Pliable Channels, an exhibition of new work by Meg Lipke, along with a full-color exhibition catalog featuring an introductory essay by Julia Kunin.

Meg Lipke’s work brings textiles into the sculptural realm while incorporating elements of abstract painting. Her stuffed muslin forms are often complexly ornamented and dappled with bright colors, creating a sense of exuberance. In works like Support, this exuberance is darkly tempered by resemblances to life preservers, restraints, and skeletal systems. In the process of making her forms, Lipke subjects them to binding, tying, and squeezing—potentially brutal processes undertaken in the service of restoration and repair.

Lipke’s use of textiles is indubitably connected to her personal history. Her grandfather owned a textile factory in Manchester, England, and Lipke’s grandmother, Patricia Sinclair Hall, was an artist who weaved thread using a loom she hand-fashioned from plumbing pipes. She also painted fabrics and used batik (a method of applying wax resistant patterns to muslin pieces originated by Ancient Egyptians), crafts she passed to Lipke’s mother, Catherine Hall, and which Lipke incorporates into her own painting today. Lipke’s mother brought the handmade loom from England to Brooklyn, and Lipke has used its warp and weft to add lines and layers of color to her paintings. In her introductory essay to the catalog accompanying this exhibit, Julia Kunin writes that, as a third-generation fiber artist, Lipke brings together “the physical, the personal and the historical. Her richly layered abstract works project an uncannily bodily presence, evoking visual delight and a visceral response as they are continually labored over, woven and restored.”

Meg Lipke was born in 1969 in Portland, Oregon and was raised in Burlington, Vermont and Cheshire, England. She received her MFA from Cornell University and has taught at The University of Northern Iowa, Cornell University, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been reviewed in Art in America, the Village Voice, the New York Times and many online publications. She lives and works in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

Please join us at the opening reception for the artist on Saturday, March 5 from 7-10 PM. Refreshments will be served. For more information or to order the exhibition catalog, please contact Nick Lawrence at [email protected].