Video Craft
Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco
February 28 - August 16, 2025
curators: Ariel Zaccheo and Sarah Mills
Video Craft explores the formal and technical properties that video, film, and early moving image technologies share with more traditional craft media like ceramics, textiles, and glass.
Many contemporary artists have been drawn to video’s features, including its imaging technologies, usages of time, space, and (sound) aesthetics in new explorations of form making. In doing so, they have blurred the lines between the disembodied space of video and other, more tangible media, such as textiles, clay, plastic, film, and glass. There is a strong sense of materiality in these areas of overlap–where harnessed light and motion results in textural patterns and projections with haptic qualities.
Craft practices have long been cut out of new media discourse—a trend currently being reversed. Through themes of encoding, looping, and sampling, Video Craft takes terms usually associated with media art and expands them to examine practices by artists using a wider range of materials and techniques, many of which are rooted in craft history.
Video Craft brings together nearly 20 artists at different stages of their careers, from early pioneers of video production to emerging digital natives. The exhibition hopes to illustrate an unlikely partnership between the heavily embodied practices of craft and the ephemeral nature of the screen.
Kate Nartker, Jacquard woven frame for Green Screen, 2025
The Woven Pixel
San José Museum of Quilts and Textiles
January 28 - May 15, 2025
This exhibition explores the rise of digital weaving which emerged in the early 2000s. It brings together a variety of work by artists and designers who experiment with digital looms and jacquard software. It pays tribute to two artists in particular, Bhakti Ziek and Alice Schlein, who wrote The Woven Pixel (2006), which quickly became something of a bible for weavers in art, design and industry—-and referenced still today. Because every intersection of warp and weft represents a pixel, weaving seamlessly merged with the earliest computer technologies. Today digital weavers are altering the landscape of contemporary art and design using algorithmic painterliness, expressive structures and flexible parametric forms.
Bhakti Ziek, Brocade, 2024, jacquard woven
Photo courtesy of Bhakti Ziek
Plane Break: Annie Ling, Jason Isolini, and Monika Sziladi
January 31 - April 22, 2022
The picture plane is a threshold that separates illusion from reality. Although it refers to the surface of a two-dimensional object, it more accurately describes the process of looking into an illusionistic space without noticing the material on which the image rests. This occurs when we observe photographs or watch TV. We see the image, not the plastic screen or paper. Our minds have trouble holding both in view at once. What happens, then, when the picture plane is broken? When its presence and absence compete for our attention, disrupting our sense of realities (material/real and illusionistic)? Here, in this intermedia zone of photography-sculpture, where sensorial and optical perceptions wildly intersect, the photographers in this exhibition recognize something familiar.
Jason Isolini, Untitled (Magenta), 2022, lenticular
Photo courtesy of Jason Isolini
Between Starshine and Clay: Kiyan Williams, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, and Vinnie Bagwell
February 5 - May 9, 2021
co-curated with: Jennifer Jones
Images of enslaved Africans on the Atlantic Coast manifest in the featured work of Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, Vinnie Bagwell, and Kiyan Williams. Much like the rhetorical question in Lucille Clifton’s poem ‘won’t you come celebrate with me’ — in which the lines “between / starshine and clay” contemplate a life journey against all odds — work in this exhibition honors hardships endured while critiquing historical memory in the United States. In a-Historical Landscapes, Superville Sovak superimposes figures of 19th century anti-slavery literature onto contemporaneous idyllic American landscapes of the Hudson River School, to reexamine the concept of historical. Bagwell’s work also addresses omission. In two public sculpture projects, Victory and Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden, the Yonkers-based artist makes figurative representations in bronze, humanizing enslaved Africans whose lives were integral to the building of this nation. Jubilant and defiant outstretched arms made of gleaming stones and soil from an African-American burial ground in Queens emerge from the ground in Williams’s Reaching Toward Warmer Suns. This monument along with Notes on Digging channel freedom in catharsis.
Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, Rogers’ Slide Lake George,
from the series a-Historical Landscapes, 2019, print
Photo courtesy of Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
CHIAOZZA: Color Gathers Space
September 5 - November 23, 2020
Image
CHIAOZZA, install photo, 2020
Photo courtesy of Adam Fezza
Exhibitions curated at WCC Art Gallery
Westchester Community College
State University of New York