The Museum of Craft and Design (MCD) presents Video Craft, an exhibition exploring the unlikely partnership between the heavily embodied practices of craft and the ephemeral nature of the screen. Craft and screen media haven’t been discussed together, though they share more properties than we assume. The exhibition is organized thematically between encoding, looping, and media discourse. Video Craft highlights art practices that employ a wide range of materials and techniques, many rooted in craft history and features 19 artists.
Encoding
Encoding explores the translation between one medium to another and the resulting transformations. London-based sculptor William Cobbing works in clay and ceramics. The artist feels that clay in raw form has aspects that are both attractive and repulsive, and in those reactions, he found interesting sensory conflicts while viewing raw clay manipulated on video.
The video can be seen when the viewer stares into a biomorphic viewfinder called the Grog Cave. Inside this cave, Will.man.meʙoşa shows bright blue, yellow, and violet paint pouring out of a clay mask’s hollowed-out eyes and mouth. Comical and disturbing, the spilling paint could be seen as tears or even vomit in a heightened sense of exaggerated physicality.
Looping
Looping can be seen as a play on words between the rhythm of pulling a knit stitch or the repetition of a digital image link, or a video glitch. Looping also symbolizes an idea about joining disparate qualities. Animated Quilt of Nathan and Bryan by Gregory Climer is composed of 36 individual quilts photographed and edited into a stop-motion animation. The animation creates a mesmerizing two-second loop showing two men reciprocally kissing on the cheek. Each 36-inch-by-48-inch quilt took months to complete. The intricate patchwork is instantly recognizable as representing pixels, which have been converted into fabric and returned to digital again. It is, in every sense, a loop. The careful labor behind each quilt represents a single millisecond of motion.
Material histories
Some Video Craft artists connect and sample from varying formats to create sensorial frameworks in video and film. The sources reconfigure to create new media and, in the process, change materiality to form new contexts. Warp Trace, a video montage by Senga Nengudi, draws on the history of the Jacquard punch card panel. The interconnected rectangular paper cards, punched with holes, are linked into a continuous chain, allowing a needle to pass through, enabling industrial weaving. In this context, the cards act like programmable data storage. Warp Trace projects a video montage of sounds and images derived from industrial weaving mills, resampling the historic materials as a dialogue between textile patterning, video sequencing, and the history of machine logic.
“The histories of craft and moving image technologies have always been interwoven — just as one example, the Lumiere brothers’ projector prototype used a claw foot from a sewing machine to advance the film. With video’s ubiquity in daily life, it seems important to explore the hand, the materiality, of video and film,” said curator Ariel Zaccheo. The exhibition includes artists who pioneered video production as well as emerging digital creators to shape this exhibition and its connections to tactile practices. Video Craft brings craft practices into the ongoing discourse of new media, transforming both in the process.
Video Craft opens Feb. 28 and will be on display through Aug. 16 at the Museum of Craft and Design.