ASSEMBLED: Julia Couzens, Helen O’Leary, Cornelia Schulz

Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA

October 20 – December 1, 2018

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to introduce Julia Couzens, Helen O’Leary and Cornelia Schulz in Assembled. The exhibition brings together three women whose art practices explore the formal and intuitive in assemblage and construction. With their richly evocative diversity of materials, each artist’s approach of obscuring and revealing content tells oblique narratives of personal, social and cultural reckoning.

There’s a centuries-strong tradition of artists working with fiber to wrap, stretch, contort and otherwise manipulate over, into, and around inanimate objects forming figurative and abstract sculptural forms. Sheila Hicks, Shinique Smith, and Outsider artist Judith Scott are among them. Julia Couzens’s hybrid practice expands upon this legacy of exploring the many aspects of working with fiber and textiles.

Receiving her MFA from the University of California, Davis, Julia Couzens began working with fiber in the 1990s. Conversant with Modernist sculptural traditions, she pivots craft and domestic textile traditions into drawing, painting and sculpture. Couzens views her studio practice as a collaboration with anonymous others as she stitches, bundles, and sutures fabrics that have history, or in lay terms, used, discarded, worn, damaged mercantile goods. Layering her collection of materials, she composes intricate fabrications into “metaphorical objects of memory.” On view in this exhibition is an ongoing exploration of fiber sculpture Couzens refers to as Bundles. With wire armatures these floating gestural riffs on tapestries punctuate  the environment like elaborate woven satellites.