Matter Matters: Dispatches From A Material World

As a long-time knitting hobbyist, I was excited to see the UMKC Gallery of Art hosting Matter

Matters, a show curated by Davin Watne and featuring the work of Karolina Gnatowski, Dan

Gunn, Noel Morical, and Alex Lockwood. Having mistaken the show for an exhibition of fiber

art, I was happy to find fabric, wood, plastic, lottery tickets and even bullet casings creating a

primer in the gestalt potential of tapestry. Matter Matters communicates the ways that

individual units can work with and between one another to convey moods and messages

vastly different from the materials’ original intent. It digs into the many lives objects can lead,

affecting us and the world we inhabit in profound and sometimes terrifying ways.

Eye Lets from karolinagnatowski.com.

Karolina Gnatowski’s giant knit tapestries were the first pieces to catch my eye. Gnatowski

stretches large swaths of often striped knit fabric to create curvilinear patterns, laying bare

the work that goes into creating even a basic knit stitch (let alone stripes, cabling, etc.). Their

pieces hold strange and surprising artifacts: a patterned hand holding a lacy shroud from

which a piece of jewelry dangles, two swaths of fabric that might be stockings. These

insertions — or extrusions, rather — seem to suggest something more going on behind the

surface of the pieces, a life being lived in these hanging garments. To me they also convey the

quiet grace of domestic labor. Knitting seems like the ultimate symbol of women’s work: stitch

after uniform stitch woven dutifully together to create something functional. The socks that wear

holes and then are darned and replaced, the hat that gets lost after one season, the sweater

layered between shirts and coats. By stretching these knit items out, interspersing them with

adornment and laying bare the complexities of their construction, we remove them from the

world of mere function. It is then that we can view them for their formal and aesthetic qualities.

In Gnatowski’s pieces, the cloth wears the person.

Smiley Smiles from karolinagnatowski.com.

piLLow from karolinagnatowski.com.

Hidden among Gnatowski’s splashier works is a small piece called piLLow. It’s a pillow

embroidered with a washed-out scene depicting a stand of trees and, somewhere in the far

distance, the murmurs of a city. Oscillating waves of beads that spell out “PILLOW” dangle

from the pillow, capitalizing on the piece’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get attitude. It hovers

between campy and ordinary, raising questions of what gets to be art and what gets

relegated to the bargain bin at Goodwill. The difference between the two realms is not, in this

case, an aesthetic distinction.

Evening Scenery from dangunn.com.

Striking woodcut pieces by Dan Gunn share wall space with Gnatowski’s art. Made by

tracing draped fabric in colorful wood, Gunn’s work puts you in the uncanny valley between

firm and soft, movable and sturdy. His wooden draperies seems like they should sigh in the

breeze and respond to your touch.

Turnover Setting from dangunn.com.

Turnover Setting, a small sculpture bedecked with polka dots, is especially striking in its

folds, bold colors, and graceful arrangement. This almost comical ode to the lowly

handkerchief highlights the way it’s often treated, left as it is to collect snot and the lint at the

bottom of our pockets.

Dan and Karolina’s work look fantastic together. They draw our attention to craftsmanship

and form, to the anonymity of the people creating the objects we live our lives among. In the

era of fast fashion and rampant consumerism and waste, we’re alienated from the specifics

of our things: where do they come from, who makes them, and what happens to them when

we’ve moved onto the next trend? Gnatowski and Gunn’s pieces force us to consider cloth

quite literally at eye level: to contemplate what it’s made of and what it means, to treat it as

more than just future fodder for the trash.

Kemosabe-Wabe from noelmorical.com.

The other two artists featured in Matter Matters are Alex Lockwood and Noël Morical. Both artists

use unlikely materials — parachute cord in Morical’s case and a number of household and

industrial objects in Lockwood’s — to create fibrous, tactile sculptures. Noël creates massive wall

hangings and mounts using macraméed parachute cord, resulting in massive, colorful, and

textural sculptures. Her pieces wind and undulate to create organic shapes and blobby masses,

allowing us to think of parachute cord and its possibilities differently. Morical’s piece display

impressive craftsmanship: the thick parachute cord is expertly twisted and knotted, belying the

work that went into it. Her long thick ropes are especially satisfying: thick chunks of fabric, big

knots. Spiraling down from the ceiling, they feel sturdy, bold.

Assorted Noel Morical pieces, photo my own.

I was disappointed that Noel’s pieces are for the most part all stuck in one corner of the show

— their placement makes them hard to consider individually, as they seem like disjointed

pieces of an unbalanced whole rather than discrete works worth considering individually.

While I think the placement of her work doesn’t give the viewer easy access to the details in

her pieces, it does raise questions about parts vs. whole, and how we choose to categorize

things — a callback to gestalt themes running through the exhibit.

 Alex Lockwood, photo author’s own.

Alex Lockwood’s art is similar to Morical’s in that Lockwood creates sculptures from unlikely

objects, exploring what can be done with ubiquitous things. Bottle caps, lottery tickets, bullet

casings, and more are pieced together to create masks, ropes, and the figure of a person.

Lockwood’s pieces can be seen as exploring how the objects surrounding us create our

identity, the things we use and touch becoming the filter the world sees us through.

Alex Lockwood, photo author’s own.

His art can also be seen as an invective against the mass quantities of stuff we create and

thoughtlessly consume, with no mind paid to the work that goes into its creation or the

consequences of its production.

The large-scale creations made of bullet casings and lottery tickets can be viewed as laying

bare the mundanity of evil, the plasticity of the things we use to destroy ourselves and

others. Indeed, Lockwood’s repurposing of bullet casings recalls the passage in Isaiah that

reads, “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning

hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they know war anymore.”

Whether Lockwood’s message is as proscriptive or as hopeful as Isaiah’s remains to be

determined. It seems more likely that Lockwood’s work is a kind of black comedy, reflecting

the artifacts of the everyday violence we commit against people and nature in the name of

convenience through a funhouse mirror.

Lockwood and Morical’s pieces both explore unlikely uses for ubiquitous objects, especially

objects that often facilitate violence, while Gnatowski and Gunn focus on ways to reimagine

fabric and its presence in our lives. All four artists are discussing the things around us that

we don’t examine, however, and the possibilities that lie in the objects we overlook.

They’re also all reveries on the violence inherent in anonymity and mass production: the

disappearing worker, the disappearing self, the disappearing world. Matter Matters as a

whole is a colorful reflection on the life of materials from creation to eventual end. This show

explores a number of ways that small and ordinary make up our lives as well as the nature of

making and consumption. It’s a meditation on the small and the large, on violence and

beauty, on light and dark, on fragments and wholeness.