Heather Cook, “Routine 6 Fold (Purple/Seam) 2”, 2010, bleach on cotton jersey, silkscreen and push pins, approx. 80 x 51 inches
February 16-March 18, 2018
Remembering 1980’s soft sour bleach burning through denim, usually too much and too long, poured soaked and sloshed in the washing machine, and personally with seldom successful re- sults, spotted splotched and frayed fabric piling and splitting, leaving bare hands soapy slick and unwanted holes in not good places. Jersey fabric is a textile also synonymous with the decade, however one much less expected to be put through the rigorous course of the acid wash. It was popularized as a go-to material in comfort wear design by “Coco” Chanel around 1920, nearly half a century after its invention. Characterized by its crosswidth stretch and efficient production, it’s a material that indexes the corporeal closeness of t-shirts and underwear. Proliferated by the modular fashion lines “Units” and “Multiples” that grew from a fashion-design-school-project-turned-mall-store-phenomenon by Sandra Garrett, jersey “Units” became synonymous with stretchy, nondescript cotton pieces that could be reversed, worn in ensemble, and interchanged to create completely new outfits- they precursed American Apparel’s ubiquitous basics.
Though two four-foot square bleached cotton jersey swatches have been stitched together to create a wall-height, figure-referencing rectangle, as if a full body stretched could reach the corners with fingers and toes, Heather Cook’s “Routine 6 Fold (Purple/Seam) 2” is decidedly non-garment shaped. And while Janis Jefferies has remarked that “the coalescence between women and textiles has produced a fixity of identity in the West, which has named but has not always expanded or moved beyond a single definition of both terms,” Cook’s “Routine” moves fast past typified gender-codified textile based work, oft laborious and fraught with documen- tation of the feminine experience. Instead of the potential additive “bits and pieces from which the psychological self are made” that Carolyn Steedman refers to, inherent in processes like quilting, knitting, weaving or embroidery, Cook has subtracted from the surface, a distinct move also apart from production-oriented contemporaneous digital technology driven textiles.
Standing in front of the work, “Routine” points inward and outward, circumscribing its formal and material dynamics in a field populated with silkscreened signs, creases, a grid of swashed bleach and other physical evidence of its making. The bleached grid presents in near trompe l’oeil as raised creases, and this highly illusive detail also points outward, overlying or underlying actual creases that evidence the previous and subsequent storage of the work. “Routine” is a schema of its own transition from folded material accumulation to fully extended and opened wall-work. The folds not only evidence how the piece was made but are also an instruction manual for how to store the work. Folding, an activity generally employed to avoid wrinkles, is utilized in the making of “Routine” in order to intentionally accent the imperfections and geome- tries of making things fit.
Silkscreened black numbered arrows point to particular seams, mostly on the upper left-hand side of the piece, reminiscent of constellation diagramming, and order the visual experience of the work. Like looking into the night sky, Cook’s piece is absorptive, a few drips of bleach conjure star-like constellations on the dense field - some of the stars we see are long gone, some are still there, their light traveling light years to reach our solar system. The 1 through 6 numbered arrows in “Routine” orient us and determine an x and y axis, but the hard visual push and pull of the piece figures on its color which inveigles a z axis that reaches far both in and out of the work. “Routine” feels iridescent though it is purple as its title implies and it is also pink, the two colors coalescing as ultraviolet, like the elusive interference rays of the rainbow aura, the highest frequency hue in the visible spectrum and anecdotally, the 2018 Pantone color of the year. The color is Cartesian and dimensional, like its arrows and numbers, pointing towards itself, pointing towards the cosmic atmosphere it evokes.
“Routine” is a plan (how its folded is how it’s made - it doesn’t refer to anything outside of itself), but it also produces a visual effect that mirrors the handling and folding movements of the artist in her studio- an auto-biography of a moment. The notion of “self referentiality” is popularly sit- uated within an architectural discourse related to inextricable relationships between constituent parts of a structure. Peter Eisenman describes the idiosyncratic staircase of Corbusier’s Dom-ino House as being “half inside and half outside” - a sign notation which calls attention to the stair as addition and subtraction. In a 1990 lecture at SCI-Arc about Frank Gehry’s addition of an eccen- tric external stairway to the Loyola Law School library entrance, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe described that this staircase “... itself comes out in order to go in, providing as it does that a kind of plat- form half way up from which to look both back and down and up. A viewing platform distanced from that to which it is connected which is also that of which it is itself a part.”
With “Routine” Heather Cook sets up shop at this intersection of formal decisions and conceptu- al scaffolding, tethering each respective concern closely, collapsing the space between signifier and signified, producing a close oscillation that constitutes a transitional language situated mid- way between the making of the piece and its being. “Routine” precisely outlines not only what it is, but what is (and was) going to be done, and is full of self awareness of its unique conceptual situation.