On view May 20–July 2, 2021 at SPACE Gallery (Portland, Maine)
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Squeaky Wheel is pleased to share the touring of Punctures: Textiles in Digital and Material Time to SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine! Originally exhibited at Squeaky Wheel in Fall 2020, Punctures draws from the little-known but expansive history connecting media arts and textile production. The exhibition features artists invested in the material, critical and liberatory politics of their intersections.

From the Lumière brothers taking the intermittent motion of a sewing machine to create the cinematograph, to the punch cards of the Jacquard loom forming the basis of modern computation, and the role of sewing and gendered labor in jobs like editing and dyeing in film production, textile production remains an essential, but insufficiently unacknowledged formal and social influence on media arts. These underpinnings aim to not only explicate an alternate history, but are meant to find ways to speculate new futures for media practice.

Punctures allows audiences to engage with artworks exploring a wide range of practices including, trans fashion and domesticity; gendered and immigrant labor under global racial capitalism; Gelede women’s commemoration, protest and power as represented in textile work; speculative future-casting through Oglala Lakota knowledge systems, and more.

Curated by Squeaky Wheel, the touring exhibition features installations by Betty Yu, Cecilia Vicuña, Charlie Best, Eniola Dawodu, Kite, and Sabrina Gschwandtner.

SPACE is a nonprofit organization that supports contemporary arts projects, champions artists, and encourages an open exchange of ideas. Grounded in the belief that vital communities are activated by experimentation, conversation, and camaraderie, SPACE engages a wide audience with provocative arts programming and category-defying events. As a nexus for curious minds, we collaborate with original thinkers and invite the public to participate in the ongoing pursuit of adventurous ideas.

Image: Installation view, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, March 16–June 18, 2017. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. Photo: Alex Marks.