A Pattern of Moments:
Kate Burke, Rebecca Kreisler, Sylvia Schaefer
Ronnie Lukasiewicz Gallery
Lyndon House Arts Center
Athens, GA
November 8, 2022 - March 4, 2023
A Pattern of Moments features artwork by Kate Burke, Rebecca Kreisler, and Sylvia Schaefer. The three artists share a feminized aesthetic sensibility and color palette, reflected in their chosen material: thread, folded paper, or quilted fabric. These artists engage in laborious tasks, each repeating a singular process multiple times in completing their pieces, as they investigate the concepts of communication, movement, and expanding space.
REPETITION
The repetition involved in constructing (crafting) each of these works brings to mind repetitious tasks historically relegated to women, such as cooking dinner, making beds, doing dishes, folding laundry – tasks constantly done only to be undone, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up hill. The art world has a history of celebrating these actions. For instance, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Art Manifesto from 1969, established awareness of and a place of honor for the unseen requirements of daily life.
“A Pattern of Moments” references experiential repetition: repeating cycles of life and death, the sun and moon, planets, relationships, mistakes, decisions revisited, daily schedules. “A Pattern of Moments” symbolically weaves together individual threads of experience, patched like quilt squares, or folded paper connected infinitely.
Introducing PATTERN into the title of a three-woman exhibition recalls the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s. Pioneers in that movement, such as Miriam Schapiro, challenged “Western art history’s feminization and condemnation of color, ornament, and other surface effects as emotional and seductive,” according to Museum of Decorative Arts’ curator Elissa Auther.
DICHOTOMY
Rebecca Kreisler, who holds her MFA from Louisiana State University and BFA from UGA, creates geometric forms from folded paper, organized in patterns inspired by quilts. Repeating shapes and colors undulate as though moving in space. Her series “Moment/Momentum,” which plays on the idea of stillness vs. movement, served as the impetus for the exhibition. Rebecca is interested in dichotomies: organic and rigid, angular and soft, stable and dynamic. Though her creations are brightly colored and crafted from a simple material (paper) with an easily accessible technique (folding and cutting), the appearance is that of a complex tightly controlled system fabricated through complicated means. Rebecca notes, “for me the ‘pattern’ is that sense of the whole, the relationship of parts/pieces that creates something more.”
UNRAVELING
Kate Burke, an Atlanta-based sculptor with a BFA in Fabric Design from UGA, utilizes thread for her conceptually motivated artworks, repeating delicate motions to create the six-foot wide structure “There you are” on tulle. Her wall-bound sculptural embroideries explore technology and the impact modern forms of communication have on relationships. With her work, she asks, “Is technology strong enough to house all of our complexities and dichotomies within its binary nature; is it strong enough to hold all of us?” The unraveling pixelated images in her artworks suggest the answer is “no.” Squares of color that form the pixelated image of a flower out of thread are most obviously unraveling in “All the Petals Fall Eventually.” As the title suggests, we see a flower in three stages of decay.
Three works by Kate Burke grouped together explore the lack of emotive power sometimes found in electronic communication. For instance, a “thumbs up” or a “like” in response to a text or social media post cannot convey depth of feeling. In “You Loved ‘I hope to see you soon,’” a pixelated image represented in thread dissipates. Even with limitations, Kate writes, “The landscapes of technology can feel endless.” (Vast and limited)
HOLDING IT TOGETHER
Sylvia Schaefer is an award-winning quilter with a background in science, who designs original patterns for exquisitely crafted quilts. Her design process begins with a traditional quilt block, which she expands, incorporating negative space to create an open design. Utilizing traditional patterns as a starting point for explorations, she works towards “the inclusion of expansive negative space in quilt designs,” which she says “provides a blank canvas for the quilting stitches holding the layers of the quilt together.” Deconstructing familiar patterns, moments fall apart and unravel. Sylvia’s quilts create a balance of breaking apart while holding together.
THE STRONGEST SHAPE
The artists in “A Pattern of Moments” each deal with notions of math as art, most directly Sylvia Schafer and Rebecca Kreisler. Considered the strongest shape in nature, the triangle is a building block for quilt designs, folded paper, and patterns everywhere.