Art: Stretching 'fiber' to the max

FiberPhiladelphia commentary, short form, with deepest apologies to William Blake:

Fyber, Fyber shining bright/Watch the weavers taking flight./Their creations can impress/Even when they're fyber-less.

If you haven't noticed, Philadelphia is up to its armpits in fiber exhibitions this month and into next, thanks in part to last weekend's symposium on "fiber and textiles in contemporary art and culture."

More than two dozen exhibitions in the region carry us to the leading edge of what is loosely categorized as "fiber art." I say "loosely" because some of the art in these shows, especially the major ones mentioned below, is only tenuously connected to textile traditions, if at all.

Why is that? Because, I suspect, artists who work with fiber are tired of being pushed to the back of the art-world bus. They long to escape the stigma of personal adornment and domestic decoration. They lust after first-world parity with painters, sculptors and video artists.

To achieve it, many have pushed the limits of fiber art almost beyond plausibility, by making pieces of non-fibrous materials such as metal and plastic. In many cases, these works allude to textile structures, textures and patterns. But in some cases, the connection is purely conceptual (if one chooses to be indulgent), or even imaginary.

These developments aren't exactly news; the trend has been evident for some time. Yet the FiberPhiladelphia exhibitions make the transition from practical craft to high art especially striking.

The sculptures of Warren Seelig, one of the symposium's organizers, offer a prime example of fiber's unorthodox new frontier. Seelig is included in the two largest and most impressive of the current fiber shows, "Hot House" at the Reading Public Museum and the 6th International Fiber Biennial at Snyderman-Works Galleries in Philadelphia.

Seelig's wall pieces consist of gridded metal frames adorned with plastic disks and rings, often colored. The metal "weave" evokes textile architecture, while the disks and rings animate with lively color and pattern. They're delightful sculptures, but if you didn't see them in a "fiber" context you probably wouldn't make the association.

For this reason, "fiber art" as currently defined should be considered a contentious term. Any material that contains fibers, either natural or synthetic - wood, for example - can qualify. Yet in Reading, even this basic criterion is sometimes abandoned.

The show includes two sets of large color photographs, one of taxidermied sheep and the other of clothes draped over rocks as funerary offerings. Both entries are presented as "conceptual" fiber. Nearby is a video program about butterflies whose allusion to the fiber tradition escaped me.

At Snyderman-Works in Old City, the biennial includes a ceramic vessel form "woven" from chain-mail-like links of clay (by Ruth Borgenicht) and an American flag image composed from strips of exposed photographic film (by Joan Dreyer).

The shows both embody imaginative eclecticism and experimental elan, but differ thematically. "Hot House" celebrates 37 years of innovation in the field at Cranbrook Academy of Art, near Detroit. All the works were created by graduates of Cranbrook's fibers program, most of them, like Seelig and Philadelphian Michael Olszewski, with master's degrees.

The show was organized at Cranbrook, one of the country's premier art schools, and was seen there last summer and fall. The Reading version, smaller than the original, contains about 60 works by more than 40 artists.

Snyderman-Works, a vigorous promoter of fiber art since 1998, has pulled together a larger show - 95 artists - in a space too confined for such abundance. Yet there's a positive dimension to such exaggerated proximity; the dozens of contrasting colors, forms and textures so close together creates unremitting visual excitement.

That said, the exhibition also affirms the general impression, formed in Reading, that fiber art has evolved about as far as possible from its roots in weaving. Throughout the history of this biennial, new concepts and techniques have popped up each time, as they do this year, yet one can't escape the conclusion that fiber art can't extrapolate further without leaving fiber behind completely.

For one thing, the Snyderman-Works artists, like those in Reading, have come to rely on a wide range of non-fibrous materials to realize their ideas. For instance, Xiang Yang is exhibiting a sculpture made by stringing hundreds of colored threads between the ends of a sturdy steel frame. The threads contribute color and dash, but the frame gives the sculpture its form. Is this a fiber piece with metal or a metal piece with fiber? Neither dominates.

Another quality more evident here than in Reading is the primacy of a decorative aesthetic. A spiky yellow vase form fashioned from reeds by Michael Davis can be admired for craftsmanship and flair but not for anything more spiritual.

By contrast, an exhibition at University of the Arts of current work by 21 Korean artists feels somewhat more traditional - this despite the imposing presence in the gallery's Broad Street window of an alien warrior sculpture, larger than life, by Hwa-Jin Oh. It's made of dark artificial leather meticulously stitched over a Styrofoam core. (Leather is technically fiber, I suppose, but Styrofoam?)

All the work, which is installed in the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery and across the street in the Hamilton and Arronson Galleries, comes from Korea. The artists are plugged into international trends, but they haven't abandoned traditional fiber methods and structure.

For example, the largest work in the show, and one of the most impressive, is a 61-foot-long tapestry by Shin-Ja Lee in muted grays and browns that depicts a panoramic Korean landscape in the style of a brush painting. Another powerful weaving, The Letter From Iraq by Burn-Soo Song, creates a vivid trompe l'oeil effect of bullet holes in a wall.

The Korean show is almost soothing after the brilliant razzle-dazzle of "Hot House" and the Snyderman-Works biennial. It's innovative, but also reassuring in the way it allows the intrinsic qualities of fiber to assert themselves in new and unexpected ways.

"Hot House" continues at the Reading Public Museum, 500 Museum Rd., through June 15. The museum is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, to 8 p.m. Fridays, and from noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission is $7 general and $5 for visitors 61 and older, students with ID, and children. Information: 610-371-5850 or www.readingpublicmuseum.org.

The Sixth International Fiber Biennial at Snyderman-Works Galleries, 303 Cherry St., continues through April 23. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Information: 215-238-9576 or www.snyderman-works.com.

"Contemporary Korean Fiber" continues at University of the Arts, in the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, 333 S. Broad St., and the Hamilton and Arronson Galleries, 320 S. Broad St., through April 5. Exhibition hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, to 8 p.m. Wednesdays, and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Information: 215-717-6480 or www.uarts.edu.EndText